FALSE PROFITS

Luxury escapes, free-flowing champagne and a life of endless possibilities ... That's what the Courtenay House Investment Group promised its investors. Instead, Australia's biggest Ponzi scheme sold them a house of cards, and some victims lost everything.

In 2016, Janette* was at a Christmas soiree at the Sydney Opera House, enjoying a soft drink with her investment group to celebrate another year of strong returns, unaware she was on the precipice of catastrophe. The mood was festive. The company director, Tony Iervasi, liked to invite his clients to a get-together once a year and Janette, now 70, had previously been to a company party at Sydney's Star Casino, and a day at the races in a roped-off area with free-flowing champagne and canapés. These gatherings made investors feel as if they were part of something but, Janette says, they weren't ostentatious or extravagant.

"It's not like he hired out the Joan Sutherland Theatre; it was just in the lobby area," she says of the Opera House event. "Yes, it's a bit flash to fork out for that," Janette supposes, but mostly she felt Tony was a "down-to-earth" kind of guy. "He was very nice. Ordinary," she says.

"He wore jumpers and trousers to the office. No flashy jewellery. No chains, nothing." He took the time to take his investors out for coffee. His office was unremarkable. "It was very plain. Computers in the background. A secretary on his floor," she says. Though she did note there never seemed to be much on his desk, Janette's point is she had no reason to suspect she was being scammed.

Yet, within months, the Bondi-based investment group, Courtenay House, would be shut down, its accounts frozen and its directors forbidden from leaving the country. The company that had promised, and delivered, strong, consistent profits, turned out to be the biggest Ponzi scheme Australia had, at the time, ever seen.

Which is to say, the investment group was not an investment group at all. All of the money that people like Janette, and nearly 600 others, had handed over to be traded on the foreign exchange market was being paid to other investors, so they would believe they were earning a profit.