by Rushby Hinds » Tue Apr 08, 2008 3:50 pm
CONTAINS A SPOILER!
Ex-gang boss Mick Gatto on the Opes hunt
By Adele Ferguson
FORMER underworld boss Mick Gatto and a group of Melbourne business associates will leave Australia this morning to hunt down more than $1 billion worth of assets they believe are hidden inside collapsed stockbroker Opes Prime.
Mr Gatto told The Australian last night he was organising a class action in a bid to get back money from Opes owed to his friends and associates.
The one-time leader of the "Carlton Crew" crime gang, who now runs a successful crane company and industrial mediation business, said he did not have any personal wealth tied up with Opes, but many of his friends and associates had hundreds of millions of dollars frozen inside the collapsed stockbroker.
"The game-plan is to track down missing money overseas," he said. "I reckon it's over $1billion, and I have a good track record of tracking things down."
The collapse of Opes last month, taking hundreds of millions of dollars of clients' money with it, has already become one of the most infamous episodes in Australian stock market history.
The high-profile victims include Sydney lawyer-turned-investor Chris Murphy, who is believed to have lost more than $100 million, and Olympic hero Herb Elliott, who has lost more than $20 million of his stake in iron ore group Fortescue Metals.
Mr Gatto - who walked free from court after pleading self-defence following the fatal shooting of underworld hitman Andrew "Benji" Veniamin at the height of Melbourne's gangland war in April 2004 - said a website would be launched to attract and communicate with Opes investors, and would invite them to join his class action for an up-front fee.
Mr Gatto, who has held meetings with investors at Society restaurant in Melbourne's Bourke Street over the past week, would not reveal the countries he planned to visit or how long he would be away.
However, Opes had operations that spanned Singapore and the Middle East. Opes also had two arm's-length companies - Leveraged Capital and Hawkswood - that dealt with the stockbroker through a British Virgin Islands-registered company called Riqueza.
Mr Gatto said a number of associates had given him some leads regarding overseas assets and the purpose of the trip was to piece together information with a view to getting the money back for his clients.
The former heavyweight boxer would not identify his clients or friends but it is understood several are company directors.
He said he expected some of the class actions being launched around town to recover from Opes would join with him. This includes former kickboxing champion Leo Khouri, who has more than $50 million of his personal wealth frozen in Opes.
Mr Khouri, a day trader known as "The Gun" with a string of stakes in small listed companies, is believed to have rounded up Opes clients with a total of about $300 million in frozen accounts to join his class action, among them businessman Alvin Phua, chief executive of Byte Power.
Others include fashion designer Chris Chronis, whose Playboy franchise took a loan from a company associated with Opes last year. In 2001, Mr Chronis was financially backed by convicted drugs trafficker Tony Mokbel in the launch of his LSD (love, style and design) clothing stores.
John Khoury, who is no relation to Mr Khouri but who says they are friends, will travel as part of Mr Gatto's entourage overseas. Mr Khoury is a business associate of Mr Gatto.
Mr Khoury said the pair were working on a lot of leads that had come from very influential people who believed there was more than $1 billion tied up overseas.
He said a lot of people who were exposed to Opes had gone to the big law firms for representation but had been turned away because the firms were conflicted by their relationship with ANZ.
ANZ and investment bank Merrill Lynch were the biggest lenders to Opes.
He's still my hero even if he is a little bit crap.
