'Bigger than the Wolf of Wall Street': How a shady network of brokers ran riot in Australia

https://www.smh.com.au/business/mar...rs-ran-riot-in-australia-20201111-p56dis.html

Stavro D’Amore was stunned by what he saw. The muscle-bound, McLaren-driving man who would become boss of derivatives broker Berndale Capital Securities was no stranger to flamboyant wealth in his home town of Melbourne. But this office in Tel Aviv was something else.

It was 2015 and spread out across three floors in a circular tower in the Israeli city’s high-tech precinct were more than 300 staff working for a man called Aviv Talmor, mastermind of online trading platform UTrade.

"When he walked onto a level they would stand up and clap him," D’Amore, who was an executive in Talmor’s Australian business, told a Melbourne court in September. "I’d never seen that before."

The lawyer examining D’Amore over Berndale’s collapse in 2018 shot back: "It sounds a bit like The Wolf of Wall Street?"

"It was bigger than that," D’Amore replied.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians back themselves to invest in high-risk financial derivatives - financial products in which ordinary people can bet on the price movements in various markets, including indexes, commodity prices and currencies. Many brokers warn customers up front of the inherent risk in products like this.

Over the past 10 years the industry facilitating these trades has grown to more than 60,000 brokers, sales representatives and people working in client referral. In 2018, Australian licensed operators and their corporate representatives made $2 billion in revenue from more than 1 million customers, about 200,000 of them in Australia.

All these brokers hold licences issued by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). But in reality, the regulator has little oversight of the sector and little apparent interest in cracking down on its excesses.

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