Source document: https://docs-lawep.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/1697628216746.pdf (Australia)
21st September, 2014 Senate Standing Committees on Economics PO Box 6100 Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600 Phone: +61 2 6277 3540 Fax: +61 2 6277 5719 economics.sen@aph.gov.au Our submission relates to Horticultural MIS rather than Forestry MIS, although whilst we were involved with Forestry MIS, their impact on our life has been much less significant than that of Horticultural MIS.

Despite that, all schemes failed.


Horticultural schemes require significant ongoing funding and we include the impact of margin lending in this submission, as the dividends from uncontrolled margin lending were used by our accountant to fund MIS loans.
Page 1 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 Our Story Our accountant was Peter Raymond Holt formerly of Holt Norman Ashman & Baker (HNAB) Accountants, and the architect of a seemingly vested interest plan designed to make him rich by earning commissions.

In the process it lead to potentially bankrupting us by over committing us in debt in MIS schemes.

This total debt was unknown to us.


The schemes that we are involved with are: Timbercorp - 2004 Citrus 20 Lots Rewards Teak Project No 4 - 2005 17 Woodlots NTT Mahogany Project No 2 - 2006 6 Woodlots Timbercorp - Almond 2007 Timbercorp - Olives 2007 Timbercorp Almond - 2007 11 Lots 14 Lots 4 Lots We are in possession of very few Statement of Advices (SOA).
Certainly none which stipulate that loans are to be taken out in our name without our knowledge and funded by our margin lending dividend bank account, which unfortunately what Peter Holt & his team were doing.

We have an SOA for Citrus 2004 which outlines a loan for $80,000.00.

Beyond that, we were unware that loans were being taken out in our name for citrus / almond / olive or forestry schemes.
My husband was told by Peter Holt that he had bought the other projects, this is supported by a document that Peter Holt handed to us in December 2008 Appendix A.

Please note that under Page 2 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 ‘liabilities’ there are no loans listed relating to MIS.

It was in 2008 when we found significant deductions coming from a Macquarie Bank Account.
This account had been set up to collect dividends from the margin lending portfolios and should have been used to pay off the margin loans on the share portfolio.

This information was told to us by who at the time was Peter Holt’s assistant.

In October 2008, we received our first invoices from Timbercorp for $128,000.00 with Peter Holt’s address on them.
Any documentation from that time that we have uncovered listed Peter Holt’s address and we did not receive any paperwork from any financial institution or from the MIS schemes during the time Peter Holt was our accountant.

When we first discovered the nightmare we tried to contact Peter Holt, but he had refused to see us, take our calls or answer our emails.

This was in October / November of 2008 but we bullied our way past his Compliance Manager, and got an appointment on 16th December 2008.
At this time, we were very distressed as we were only discovering the apocalyptical mess created by Peter Holt & his team.

At that meeting, Peter Holt lied to us and he refused to talk about the deductions from the Macquarie bank accounts especially anything relating to Timbercorp.
Appendix A is the document that Peter Holt handed to us at that meeting, our Balance Sheet and represented our true financial situation as explained to us by Peter Holt and please note that there is no mention of ‘loans’ under the area market ‘Liabilities’.

Peter Holt at that time was a Fellow of the Chartered Practicing Accountants.

That is handwriting on the document who made notes during the meeting.
After that, other requests to his office for information were not Page 3 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 responded to or in case, she pretended not to understand.

We asked in many emails that were sent to their office asking for projection spreadsheets on the schemes.

These had been discussed at the meeting with Holt in Dec 2008.

We have never received the spreadsheets or any information on loans.
In an encounter with just prior to October 31, 2008 she told not to go anywhere near Timbercorp because ‘you don’t know who you will get’.

We are unsure if that meant Holt had specific people organised at Timbercorp for his clients who would also lie for him, or otherwise.

In the meantime we had spoken to from Timbercorp.

is the son of a Director of Timbercorp, .


At first seemed not to believe that we did not know anything about these schemes, in fact he got quite nasty and implied that we would have enjoyed the ‘tax rebates’ that we would have received.

However, his tone softened when we said “ we are so sorry, but can we start this conversation again, because we have no idea what you are talking about”.
He then said (words to this effect), , I know you don’t, we have many people like you (and your husband) “the stock market has fallen, hasn’t it”.

He still did not tell us about the loans, but I could hear him typing in the background and I assumed, he was looking at our account.

He wanted us to come and see him and we agreed.

I asked him again about these deductions and why Peter Holt would do this and he said ‘for the commissions’.

We were building a business and none of this made any sense.
We had several conversations with to arrange an appointment, however we had been to see a bankruptcy lawyer, who had told us both just to keep working.

I was looking for a job and I eventually found one and my husband kept on working hence we did not get to meet with It was many months later and well after the collapse of the Timbercorp schemes that we learnt we Page 4 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 owed Timbercorp nearly $600,000.00.

Today this figure is nearly $1,000,000.00.


We could not afford the Timbercorp deductions in 2008 but we did try to pay them but were unable to do so and we joined the Macpherson & Kelley (M&K) class action, which failed dismally.

More on Holt In January, 2009 visited Peter Holt alone and he confessed that he knew he did not have the staff capable of managing margin loans.

He also asked how she would manage margin accounts.
We have since been told that Banker’s Trust had often sent trainers to Holt’s office because they too knew of his incompetence.

Holt blamed Banker’s Trust for not having access to their computer facility to check margin balances during the crises of 2008.

This indicated that Holt was not running any in-house system for the monitoring of client’s margin loans and suggests that the actions of Banker’s Trust are most questionable.
Despite us not knowing about our MIS loans, these margin accounts were crucial to the funding of MIS as Holt was in effect running his own fund.

It is more than probable that this funding method is partly responsible for the downfall of Timbercorp Finance.

Peter knew that that warrants or options existed however it seems that these were not used as a mitigation tool for margin loans but rather as a way of Peter gaining commissions and eroding the equity in client’s accounts.
We received a loan statement from Macquarie Bank 4 years after separating from Peter, again we were totally unaware of having taken out a loan with Macquarie Bank.

Our Situation Today Timbercorp Finance was not our only MIS creditor and we have done our best to pay some of our debts.

Below is a brief and approximate summary of our situation and represents our losses from MIS and Margin Lending.
Page 5 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 Particulars Loan Provider Amount Paid 1 loan to Rewards Investec $90,000.00 Still paying NTT loan, this will finish in 2016.

We Unknown $40,000.000 don’t know if this project is still running as we have no correspondence.

All lost, all share portfolios Banker’s Trust $400,000.00 ($200,000 belonged to us & the rest was a loan from CBA).

$80,000.00 was misappropriated by Holt’s office.


This has been excluded from this total figure as the losses from paying margin calls is almost impossible to calculate.

Loan for Shares (lost) Commonwealth $200,000.00 Bank Today to Timbercorp Finance – this we cannot Timbercorp $1,000,000.00 pay and will bankrupt us and completely decimate our lives.

Correspondence During the years 2003 to 2008, we received no correspondence about loan balances, acceptances or other documentation relating to loans.
Any correspondence that we have been able to locate since had been forward to GPO Box , Kew.

This is not our address and is the address of Peter Holt’s office and after Timbercorp went into liquidation we were asked by the liquidator to confirm our address, by then we had contacted Timbercorp independently.
Page 6 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 The loans that we have located seem to be put together in piece meal fashion and we were unaware at any time that we were signing loan agreements and believe that trickery and misrepresentation have been used to procure signatures on documents.

There are no SOAs to support them (except for Citrus 2004 $80,000.00).

The Almond & Olive project was rejected by as was getting a 2nd margin account which was advised by Holt.
Much of the hand writing on many agreements appears to be that of who at the time was Peter Holt’s assistant.

In some documents financial history has been completely omitted or reported incorrectly.

This is a practice we would not approve.

We did not receive any Auditor’s acknowledgements by way of letters or telephone calls to confirm bank or lending institution’s loan balances.
We do acknowledge that we did receive invoices for 2008, these came from Peter Holt’s office (addressed to him) and was after the stock market crash in 2008.

Peter Holt would have known that we had no way of paying these invoices.

We did not receive any progress reports or any correspondence relating to the projects from the Responsibility Entities.
http://www.ferrierhodgson.com/au/~/media/Ferrier/Files/Documents/Corp%20Recove ry%20Matters/Great%20Southern%20Limited/December%202013/Affidavit%20of%2 0D%20Xu%20Sworn%206%20December%202013%20COR%20231.PDF demonstrates Mr Holt’s office is still seemingly misappropriating correspondence, but this time from a liquidator of an MIS project.
For further information on Mr Holt’s history and practices including information on his alleged bankruptcy please see website: www.halttosafeguardyourfinances.com Page 7 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 This website has been complied by a group of Peter Holt’s former clients and who have been severely disadvantaged / bankrupt by him.

We are members of this group.

Our View The outcome for our situation is disastrous.
We are facing bankruptcy because of the outstanding loans to Timbercorp.

Currently the Liquidator of Timbercorp Korda Mentha (KM) is offering a 15% reduction in the debt which is conditional to signing a release preventing us from pursing financial planners from litigation.

We have offered KM a 30% settlement for these debts that we did not know about and they have refused our offer.

We believe that our debt to Timbercorp should be cleared or at the very least significantly reduced because: 1.
We have not knowingly entered into any loan arrangements, we did not receive any correspondence including loan acceptance for these debts and we would have managed our situations differently had we received the invoices for the Citrus Project in 2004.

We were not meant to know about these loans, there is not enough information.

We were entitled to our paperwork and we should not be expected to observe loan document conditions that we have not seen.

2.
2.

We did not know that loan applications were being completed on our behalf by Peter Holt’s office and he was not given jurisdiction over our affairs that he had the right to act as he did.

To our knowledge he was our accountant and he did our tax.

Page 8 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 3.

The information provided by Peter Holt in SOAs was incorrect and he has been suspended by ASIC for 3 years from practicing as a financial planner.

4.
4.

Peter Holt was lying to us by withholding documents and or destroying documents that belonged to us.

5.

Peter Holt, by his own admission acknowledged that he did not have the people or the skills to manage margin loans.

6.

All stakeholders in all the schemes should have been made aware that Peter Holt was using margin loans to fund the schemes for his clients.

Appendix B is an article where the Directors of TC are blaming external parties for the failure of some of their companies.
As Timbercorp was a public company, it was the responsibility of the Directors to ensure governance over those who acted as their agents and received commissions.

This includes checking addresses and ensuring that growers receive their correspondence, failing this ensuring these agents / planners held adequate professional indemnity insurance to cover the risk to their business.
Directors of Timbercorp in at least October 2008 seemed aware of what Peter Holt was doing however there does not appear to be any market notifications or trading halts.

Peter Holt was one of Timbercorp’s largest seller of their products.

7.

Peter Holt had motive to behave improperly by the incentives offered to him by MIS organisers in the form of commissions and extra commissions.

8.
8.

The class action of M&K’s proved that the Timbercorp schemes were Ponzi and the schemes as well as Timbercorp Finance were described by the liquidator as “hopelessly insolvent’.

Failure to accurately monitor the schemes would have made problem solving impossible for the Responsible Entity and they would not have been able to ascertain, if any of the schemes were Page 9 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 profitable.
Successful TimberCorp MIS schemes could have failed because their funds were being directed to other unsuccessful TimberCorp MIS schemes of which we were part of.

This article articulates the improbability of the success of such dubious practices.
Yet no action was taken by ASIC or KordaMentha who acted not only as Liquidator but as Responsible Entity for the insolvent schemes: http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/10/13/liquidator-spills- more-beans-on-timbercorp/ and http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/07/02/the-list- of-timbercorps-victims-continues-to-grow/.

9.

We were unsuitable candidates for MIS schemes, certainly Horticultural as we do not / never have the funds or income to support just 1 scheme, let alone several.
We were building a business of which Holt was more than aware.

We did not have the knowledge or information to understand the implications of the schemes and we were deliberately misled.

10.

Most importantly, we were unaware that Peter Holt was a dishonest man and this is evidenced by actions documented on the HNAB Action Group website and that he had been reported to ASIC for up to 10 years prior the GFC.

It is interesting to note that every scheme Peter Holt was involved with, has collapsed.
Had ASIC acted earlier, we would not be in this position.

11.

Skilled professionals should have assessed our supposed loan documents.

Our loan documents are incomplete, pieced together and addressed to Holt’s office.

These inaccuracies would not have gone unnoticed by those loan assessors, representatives of the Banks who secured the loans or the administrators of Timbercorp who executed the documents.
This makes it more than evident that our loans were an arrangement between Peter Holt, Page 10 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 Timbercorp and more than likely the ANZ Bank.

In addition, due diligence of all our TimberCorp documents (loans) would have identified that we did not have sufficient assets to cover all loans and they therefore should not have been approved by TimberCorp and/or the lending bank ANZ.
Appendix C demonstrates various incomplete forms used by Holt to initiate loans with TimberCorp on our behalf.

12.

The bank’s due diligence would have revealed that the schemes were in debt and were Ponzi.

Deficits on the scheme /s reduced the likely of an alternative Responsible Entity being appointed and increased the bank’s likelihood of being able to sell the farms and collect the loans from the grower borrowers should they bankrupt Timbercorp.
All stakeholders should have been informed of scheme deficits and the decision not to inform stakeholders is nothing short of a devious plan by the bank / s who securitised the loans.

13.

Had an alternative management plan on grower borrower’s outstanding loan balances been adopted by Timbercorp’s Liquidator in 2009 e.g.

a settlement of 20% offered then the liquidation could have been finalised and the banks given an opportunity to regain their lost money in the equity markets.

14.
14.

There is no method of Project Management which supports the methodology adopted by the Directors of Timbercorp.

It is impossible to be successful if: a. stakeholders can’t afford to repay the debts to support the scheme b. stakeholders are unaware of debts c. stakeholders do not know they are in a schemes d. schemes are not monitored accurately and benchmarked against projections.
Page 11 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 e. Funds are transferred between schemes to “manage those poorly operating schemes”.

It would seem that the Timbercorp’s schemes were kept going to fund the Companies of Timbercorp.

15.

The ‘year’ of a crop or a season is accepted terminology within the agriculture industry.

If a product says it is 2004, then it can be assumed that it is either planted in 2004 or is the harvest from that year.
Agriculture generally is referred to in seasons e.g.

2014/15.

This is done to distinguish product’s growing conditions and costs.

This was completely overlooked in the Macpherson & Kelley class action.

We also believe that the loans should be cleared or significantly reduced for other stakeholders because: 1.

Peter Holt seems to have been running his own fund and using margin lending to fund the schemes, (not that we were aware of this) however it seems that the Directors of Timbercorp were aware.
This is a significant risk to all stakeholders as Peter Holt was one of the largest sellers of Timbercorp products.

2.

The Bank funded insolvent schemes so that they could collect the grower borrower’s money and sell the farms.

3.

The Directors of Timbercorp publicly blamed specific financial planners / accountants for bringing down one of the companies, yet no action was taken by ASIC or Korda Mentha in either their capacity as liquidator or Responsible Entity for the schemes.
Korda Mentha will only discount outstanding loans 15% if grower borrowers sign a declaration that they will Page 12 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 not pursue their financial planner or accountant, this is a most suspicious condition and would indicate that the Liquidator is hiding something.

Conclusion We did not have the skills to develop a business under a future financial strategy, hence we went to so called “experts” for advice.
We have been let down by every person, groups of people and organisations associated with these MIS schemes, starting with Holt, then ASIC, followed by the loan assessors, administrators and auditors who examined the loan agreements, the Directors of Timbercorp who performed no due diligence over the monitoring of schemes, the people who worked for them and the people who were paid to fund their disastrous schemes.
There has been no respect for the rules of how Australian public companies should operate let alone compliance with those rules.

The liquidators and secured creditors of the schemes are unapproachable and seemingly intent of the absolute decimation of our lives by doubling and collecting loans of which we were unware.

The mistakes of the past must be identified and corrected otherwise there is no way forward or future for MIS schemes.

Presently, as a result of them there is no future for us.
We have a range of documents to support our submission which we can provide to assist in your deliberations.

Page 13 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 Appendix A Page 14 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 Appendix B Page 15 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100 Appendix C Page 16 of 16 Forestry managed investment schemesSubmission 100