Keywords: Jamie McIntyre Henry Kaye, Moira Park, Julia Feldman, property spruiker
Henry Kaye was Australia’s most notorious property spruiker. His empire collapsed in 2003 owing up to $60 million to around 3,500 investors. The Federal Court found him in breach of the Trade Practices Act. He was banned from managing companies.
When Jamie McIntyre appeared before the Senate in 2015, he objected repeatedly to being characterised as a friend and business associate of Kaye.
The documentary record tells a different story, and it was published by the Sydney Morning Herald before the hearing took place.
What the record shows
In March 2015, the Herald described McIntyre in a report on one of his seminars as a close associate of the notorious property spruiker Henry Kaye — the description appearing in print six months before the Senate hearing.
In October 2015, the Herald reported that while McIntyre repeatedly objected to suggestions he was a friend and business associate of Kaye, he acknowledged that 21st Century had employed Kaye’s sister, Julia Feldman.
The commercial arrangement is documented more specifically still. In a March 2015 report on Kaye, the Herald described correspondence recording that sixty lots in a project had effectively been given to Kaye at $1 per block in return for his assistance coordinating 21st Century’s marketing of the Moira Park scheme — an arrangement the letter described as agreed to by Kaye, McIntyre and Feldman.
The August 2011 report on shadow brokers placed the operatives in the same frame, recording that a licence was being rented to figures including David Loughnan, described as an associate of Kaye then working for 21st Century, run by McIntyre.
Why the denial matters more than the association
Business association with a disgraced operator is not, by itself, misconduct. People work with people who later turn out badly.
What matters is what happened when McIntyre was asked about it under Senate questioning: he objected, repeatedly, to a characterisation that the country’s largest newspaper had already published, in detail, with documentary support.
Senator Xenophon’s assessment — the most evasive witness in seven years — was delivered in that context.
The template
The Moira Park arrangement is worth understanding on its own terms. Sixty lots transferred at a dollar each in exchange for marketing assistance is the kind of related-party transaction that appears nowhere in the investor-facing material and everywhere in the eventual liquidator’s report.
Investors in the current Indonesian projects have no visibility of equivalent arrangements, because there is no equivalent of a Senate committee or an Australian liquidator in the picture.