A bogus CommSec document allegedly shows missing businesswoman Melissa Caddick swindling investors by claiming they were making remarkable returns.
Daily Mail Australia has obtained a share portfolio statement the Sydney financial adviser allegedly sent to a client to mark the end of the 2014-15 financial year.
The statement purported to show the extraordinary gains that Ms Caddick’s wealth management company, Maliver Pty Ltd, had earned for its clients.
It claimed an investor had made a stunning 257 per cent return – or $118,000 – on an original $33,000 investment in Macquarie Bank stocks.
But the apparent forgery also allegedly contained the seeds of Ms Caddick’s business unraveling, when CommSec confirmed the paperwork was faked, the investor said.
Missing woman Melissa Caddick, wearing an 83 carat black sapphire necklace, with her husband Anthony Koletti during her birthday in April this year. It’s not suggested her husband was involved with the matters under investigation by ASIC
This is a purported CommSec share trading document an investor says Melissa Caddick sent to them showing they had made a 257 per cent return on Macquarie Bank holdings
‘We called CommSec and they confirmed it was not a real account number … they said the documents are fake,’ the investor told Daily Mail Australia.
‘I said, “they can’t be, as it has your logo on top” … She had (allegedly) copied and pasted the lot.’
Daily Mail Australia has independently established the document is not genuine. CommSec doesn’t even produce a document called a ‘portfolio statement’.
The words ‘FY2014-2015’ aren’t written to the bank’s typical style and the disclaimer down the bottom is wrong. (However, Macquarie stocks have enjoyed a meteoric rise, the price almost tripling since 2013.)
The investor said Ms Caddick failed to give them satisfactory answers when they confronted her about the alleged CommSec account.
‘This is how the whole thing started with ASIC.’
A young Melissa Caddick, on right in 2003 when she was working as a financial adviser with a focus on ‘high net worth’ individuals
It’s understood ‘the sh**t hit the fan’ for Ms Caddick several months ago – when other parties came forward with concerns about their investments.
Another Sydney financial planner also alleged Ms Caddick had wrongly been using her financial services licence.
‘I can’t speak about Melissa Caddick,’ the planner said on Tuesday.
ASIC has confirmed it is investigating whether Ms Caddick had been using an Australian Financial Services licence that didn’t belong to her, if she had misused investors’ funds and if she was working as a financial adviser without a licence.
At the weekend a Sydney Morning Herald report claimed Ms Caddick’s operation was run like a ‘Ponzi scheme’.
That means funds allegedly plunged into Ms Caddick’s company by later investors were used to pay out the returns of earlier investors.
The investor the Mail spoke to – a former friend of Ms Caddick’s – confirmed that was their understanding of how the alleged scam worked.
The investor said they only got back about $60,000 of the $240,000 they had invested in Maliver over the years.
ASIC declined to comment on its theory about how Ms Caddick’s enterprise allegedly worked.
‘The investigation is ongoing, so we aren’t making any conclusions on how things worked just yet,’ a spokeswoman said.
Here’s an extract from an economic commentary Ms Caddick sent to her investors for the 2014-15 financial year
Ms Caddick (centre) and her husband Anthony Koletti (right) would regularly jet off to Aspen, Colorado, where they stayed in a five-star residence
Ms Caddick led an extravagant life right up until she went missing on November 12, almost four weeks ago.
She holidayed in Aspen, flaunted Stefano Canturi jewellery, drove a $300,000 Audi R8 and called a $6.2million Dover Heights mansion home.
The mother-of-one disappeared two days after her assets had been frozen by the Federal Court and her home was raided over the ASIC investigation.
Police have been left baffled by her disappearance but are pursuing several lines of inquiry, including that she may have absconded.
There has been no sign of her despite detectives’ searches of her ‘jogging route’ and family members have urged her to return to her cliffside home.
ASIC’s case against Ms Caddick briefly returned to court on Tuesday morning.
A hearing over whether a receiver will be appointed over her property and a liquidator to her business has been listed for next week.
‘She’s in a lot of trouble for a lot of things,’ the investor said.
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