The calamitous world of King Clive Palmer

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This was published 2 years ago

The calamitous world of King Clive Palmer

By Sarah Danckert

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For months, on front page ads in almost every newspaper in Australia, mining billionaire and wannabe political player Clive Palmer has bludgeoned James Shipton, the outgoing head of Australia’s corporate watchdog.

“Shifty Shipton still at ASIC”, “Where’s the Justice?” the advertisements blare in Palmer’s signature black on yellow. Then, triumphantly in the last week of May “FINALLY - James Shipton is leaving ASIC”.

Shipton has been targeted because his now former organisation, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, is pursuing Palmer in the criminal courts. But he and ASIC are far from the only people in Palmer’s sights. Palmer has also used front page ads in major newspapers including The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald to criticise the WA and Queensland governments over their COVID restrictions, to flog the virtues of malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment and to express support for controversial rugby league player Israel Folau.

Palmer is a billionaire Queensland businessman, a serial litigant, a character now ingratiating himself with the nation’s youngsters with a popular app that generates memes featuring himself.

He’s been a significant political figure through the Queensland branch of the Liberal-National Party in the 1980s and then in the 2010s via his own eponymous Palmer United Party. He has garnered attention and influenced elections by spending millions more than the major parties on advertising, through social media, newspapers and mind-numbingly repetitive TV spots.

At his political height, Palmer commanded four seats in federal parliament, including his own lower house seat of Fairfax, which he held from 2013 to 2016. Many believe Palmer’s party helped hand Scott Morrison the 2019 election victory by directing preferences to the Coalition while running attack ads targeting the then leader of the opposition, Bill Shorten, with allegations that proved to be incorrect that Labor was planning a death tax. Palmer has been depicted on the front page of Perth’s main newspaper as Dr Evil, a cane toad and a cockroach.

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So what drives him? Does Palmer continue to harbour serious ambitions for political power? Is he an agent of chaos, a stirrer? Or is he simply trying to shore up his commercial interests?

Palmer was asked over two weeks ago for an interview, but he declined through his media manager. He also refused to answer a series of detailed questions for this story, despite doing media interviews with other publications.

Criminal charges

In the case of the Shipton advertisements, Palmer’s motivation could easily be interpreted as self-interest.

Palmer is already facing two sets of criminal charges brought by ASIC over two business matters, the first involving alleged breaches of takeover provisions in the acquisition of his Coolum leisure resort and the second set of charges, this time dishonesty offences, relating to allegations he improperly funded his successful 2013 election campaign. Palmer launched new legal challenges to both sets of criminal charges in early June, seeking to have the cases thrown out of court.

This masthead can now reveal that inside the corporate watchdog a large team has been putting the finishing touches on an investigation that may yet result in a third set of criminal charges.

Multiple sources familiar with the investigation but not permitted to speak publicly say the investigations are into Palmer’s alleged involvement in making loans from his struggling public mining company, Queensland Nickel to other companies owned by Palmer, and then forgiving those loans. The allegation under investigation is that $189 million of cash that flowed from Queensland Nickel to various Palmer entities was never paid back.

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The Age and Herald do not suggest Palmer has engaged in any wrongdoing, only that the regulator is investigating potential charges against him and that the investigation may help explain Palmer’s recent advertising blitz against ASIC.

It remains to be seen if this investigation will result in criminal charges. The Queensland Nickel investigation was instigated under Shipton and with him now gone and the new boss of the corporate watchdog Joe Longo in the seat it could be dropped, as is often the case when regulatory bosses change over.

Palmer says the two cases brought so far by ASIC are politically motivated and the matters have already dealt with by the civil courts. “All of these matters have already been heard by courts around Australia and have been dismissed,” he said in July 2020 when ASIC announced the charges.

While Palmer has dismissed the merit of the charges, it appears they still stung. Those who know the magnate say he was horrified to be subject to criminal investigations given his long history in business without prior regulatory intervention.

It was against this background that the advertising frenzy targeting Shipton began. Sources inside the corporate cop say the reason could not be clearer - in their view the advertisements were intended to pressure ASIC to drop the charges and the ongoing investigation.

If that was the point, it has failed. The criminal trials and potential new charges still loom and, with his political star fading, Palmer has still been hard at work trying to win new fans through his media-grabbing antics.

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In May, he hosted a press conference with controversial former Wallaby and rugby league star Israel Folau, pledging to support the man’s religious freedoms. He’s also in recent weeks won headlines for agreeing to fund tendentious cross bench MP Craig Kelly’s election campaign. All are tame outings, however, compared to the times he’s twerked in radio studios, goofed around in a rabbit suit or announced he was planning to build the Titanic II.

But behind the at-times clownish image, Palmer has left a trail of disappointment. For many stunts and photo-ops, there have been forgotten promises or unrealised plans: an idea for a rail line linking the iron ore fields of the Pilbara in the West to the East Coast that never materialised; plans for a steel smelter in Newcastle and in Gladstone that were quietly abandoned; unfulfilled promises of a coal mine in the Galilee Basin four times the size of Adani’s (now dubbed Bravus Mining) project.

The political project

Born in Melbourne in 1954 and raised on the Gold Coast, Palmer made his first millions as a property speculator riding the 1980s boom on the Queensland glitter strip before turning to acquiring mining leases on the cheap in WA and Queensland, many of which contained large mineral deposits.

He has long been interested in politics -- he was spokesman and later state director of the Queensland National Party and a confidant of former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, but Palmer really hit the national stage when he launched his political party, Palmer United Party, in 2013.

“He’s never struck me as particularly ideological...I think his motives are pretty transparent, aren’t they?”

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Clive Palmer

But having poured his cash and energy into winning seats in parliament, he did very little with them. His senators jumped ship to become independents and Palmer himself was photographed asleep in the lower house. His already fading political star further dimmed during the highly publicised collapse of his nickel company Queensland Nickel in 2016 and an ensuing controversy about unpaid workers’ entitlements and questionable flow of funds from the company to other Palmer entities. Palmer later agreed to pick up the $70 million workers entitlement bill after government appointed special purpose liquidators took legal action against him.

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Former PUP senator, now independent, Tasmanian Jacquie Lambie, describes Palmer as a man who remains kind to her despite the two former party mates’ famously acrimonious split in 2014.

“He does a lot of encouragement. He can be that sort of father figure,” Lambie says on her way to the hugely popular Tasmanian agricultural field day Agfest outside of Launceston.

“He was really nice, especially towards the end of that last election, saying ‘just keep calm, you’re doing really well, you’ll get over it’,” Lambie says. “I couldn’t afford to do polling and stuff so he’d say ‘I’ve been doing the polling. It’s alright, you hold in there and they just keep doing what you’re doing’”

Asked what were the policies that attracted her to Palmer’s party in the first place, Lambie shoots: “I’m not sure he had policies when I worked for him.”

Palmer must know his political power is fading; after much tough talk against the WA Labor government Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party pulled out of running in the state election in March.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who described Palmer in his recent book A Bigger Picture as both “smart” and “utterly self-obsessed”, believes his ambitions are obvious.

“Clive spent a huge amount of money in the 2019 election - around $60 million - which was mostly devoted to attacking Labor. So it would have been very helpful to the Coalition,” Turnbull said in a brief interview.

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“He’s never struck me as particularly ideological. Clearly Clive Palmer wants to support parties that are supportive of his agenda, which is coal mining and the like. I think his motives are pretty transparent, aren’t they?”

An expensive hobby

Apart from business and politics, Palmer’s key interests have been using the Australian legal system to get his way and courting public opinion. He lists “litigation” as his main hobby in the Who’s Who catalogues.

It was the Australian courts that proved him as a billionaire in 2017 after decades of conjecture, ordering the Chinese mining company CITIC, which is digging up iron ore on Palmer’s land at Cape Preston in Western Australia, to pay Palmer’s company Mineralogy at least $US400 million a year in royalties. (CITIC would later appeal to the High Court and lose in 2020 and separate legal skirmishes between the two groups remain ongoing with CITIC notching up a recent WA Court of Appeal win to expand its operations on the site.)

But in recent years he has lost more litigation than he’s won.

In May, Palmer missed out on environmental approvals for one of his Queensland coal projects and also lost his High Court bid to overturn Western Australia’s border closure - a tilt that saw him become a figure of ridicule to some in WA.

He separately lost a contempt of court bid against WA Premier Mark McGowan and the state’s attorney general John Quigley. The case involved the state’s passage of the Mineralogy Act to terminate a potentially $30 billion claim against the state over development approvals relating to one of Palmer’s iron ore-rich tracts of land. Palmer’s defamation claim against McGowan continues as do other business cases relating to his WA business interests.

Palmer also lost a high-profile civil copyright battle with Universal Music, 1980s rock band Twisted Sister and songwriter-frontman Dee Snider in the Federal Court over his use without credit of the hair metal band’s hit anthem We’re Not Gonna Take It. Palmer launched an appeal against that judgment at the end of May.

Federal Court Justice Anne Katzman said in her excoriating judgment in the copyright case that Palmer: “gave false evidence, including concocting a story to exculpate himself, indicating that the need for both punishment and deterrence is high”. The now-under appeal judgment ordered him to pay $1.5 million in damages and costs.

The cost of the infringement is pocket-change for Palmer but the stinging assessment from a judge who is widely respected could prompt other jurists to view his evidence with more caution in future. The loss also showed you could take on Palmer and beat him at his favourite pastime.

Snider is thrilled with the judgment. Speaking from his beach house in the Central American republic of Belize, he says suing Palmer was a decision based on principle rather than money.

“It’s almost a business model for certain types of people - that you’re better to ask for forgiveness than permission, and then litigate the fuck out of it” he says.

The mysterious Terry Smith

Potentially worse for Palmer, the case also heard evidence that Palmer was shown to be receiving and sending emails from an address in the name of Terry Smith. Some from members of his staff were addressed: “Hi Clive”.

Queensland Nickel’s liquidators’ investigations into Palmer’s alleged actions at Queensland Nickel have shown that was also being governed by a “Terry Smith”.

Liquidators revealed in 2016 public examinations that they believe Palmer was in fact Smith, and that if that is correct, Palmer may have been a shadow director of the business alongside the on-paper director - his nephew, Clive Mensink, who left the country before public examinations and is currently believed to be residing in Bulgaria.

Palmer admitted during public examinations in 2016 that he did use the Terry Smith email address but noted that other people had access to the email account. The Twisted Sister emails could support an argument that Palmer was the primary controller of that account, suggesting he was also behind what liquidators regard as allegedly reckless decisions at Queensland Nickel.

Public reports by the company’s general purpose liquidator, FTI Consulting, on Palmer’s activities show hundreds of millions of dollars being taken out and pledged to other Palmer entities, all at the expense of Queensland Nickel and its future creditors. Palmer told the Queensland Supreme Court during the case relating to the workers’ entitlements at the company that the loans were akin to dividend payments being paid to joint venturers and the structure of the loans and the loan forgiveness was because it had tax advantages.

Meanwhile in Coolum, a once-loved holiday resort sits overgrown and empty.

Peter Icklow was a timeshare unit owner and holiday-maker at the Palmer Coolum Leisure resort in Noosa when Palmer took over. Some of Icklow’s best family memories were formed on holidays there, he says, but soon after Palmer took over, he shut off the water and electricity and closed services for reasons that were never properly explained. The timeshare became virtually worthless.

Palmer eventually settled, Icklow says, paying villa owners their initial outlay on the units. The family holidays are gone, so are the memories. The resort is overgrown. Even the robotic dinosaur park is closed.

Unlike others who see method in Palmer’s tactics, Icklow can see none.

“He’s a law unto himself, a professor of upsetting people. He’s just a speculator.”

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