ASIC hits Allen Bruce Caratti with four-year board ban as he battles Federal prosecutors, brother John

The corporate watchdog has whacked Allen Bruce Caratti with a four-year directorship ban, adding to the troubled land developer’s array of business and personal legal battles. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission revealed on Christmas Eve it had banned Mr Caratti over “significant failures of governance and oversight” at companies enmeshed in a multiagency probe and taxpayerfunded liquidations. ASIC accused Mr Caratti of failing to honour a written assurance he would resign as a director of other companies while the regulator considered allegations related to three failed entities. “He was either willingly or carelessly making false representations to ASIC,” the Federal regulator said in a statement. Among the underlying allegations, the regulator claimed that Mr Caratti’s one-time development flagship MNWA did not keep proper business records and made unsupported tax deduction claims for the 2009-10 to 2011-12 financial years. ASIC could only release its statement and disclose Mr Caratti’s four-year directorship ban after the Federal Administrative Review Tribunal rejected a temporary-stay and secrecy application he made in October. But Mr Caratti is pushing ahead with his underlying application to overturn ASIC’s banning order, adding to a variety of cases he is fighting in the State and Federal systems. His lawyer Alan Rumsley said Mr Caratti was unhappy with the ASIC banning decision and believed there were solid grounds for the ongoing tribunal challenge. Australian Federal Police officers raided Mr Caratti’s home and offices in January 2015 as they helped the Australian Taxation Office investigate land ventures closely linked to the businessman. Mr Caratti is fighting charges laid in 2021 that he intended to dishonestly gain an advantage from a Commonwealth entity, obtained a financial gain by deception and dishonestly caused a loss or risk of loss. The District Court is scheduled to hold a trial listing hearing on January 17. Mr Caratti is also locked in two sets of Supreme Court civil battles with financier Reliance Capital Pty Ltd over money allegedly owing from guarantees on loans made to failed development companies. And he has an unresolved Supreme Court civil row with his older brother John over the carve-up of a family partnership structure set up by their late father Sergio “Mick” Caratti that holds urban and rural properties worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The older brother’s grievances include Mr Caratti having embarked on land ventures separate to the family partnership in the early 2000s. Those separate ventures were the focus of the Operation Caballus taskforce which was set up by the tax office in 2008 and joined by the AFP in 2013. Caballus became public knowledge because of the 2015 raids and through Federal Court litigation over clumsily worded search warrants. It was not until 2017 that the tax office forced various development, financing and contracting companies into liquidation under McGrathNicol partner Rob Kirman. Unveiling its decision to ban Mr Caratti from being a director, ASIC said it had relied on the statutory reports written by Mr Kirman with funding from the Assetless Administration Fund. The watchdog said collapsed Piara Waters developer Whitby Land Company failed to lodge business activity statements in 2011 and 2012 and failed to lodge tax returns for the 2010-11 to 2012-13 financial years And Whitby did not provide the tax office with consistent information on land-development costs and failed to report part of the sales from one its developments, ASIC said. Mammoth Civil, which carried out subcontract work for other companies caught up in Operation Caballus, did not have proper business records, the regulator said in its statement.