Page 2536 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 7 August 1991

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Turning to the business in the ACT, John Lark's business empire, he took advantage of the corporate crime connections of Gerald Gold and others. Lark turned the unacceptable face of organised crime into a seemingly acceptable face of corporate respectability. Whenever you attack the X-rated video industry in Canberra, there is a knee-jerk reaction from related business interests in other States, mainly Victoria.

During the past investigation links were established between Joseph David Shellim's Hollywood House company and Gerald Gold's Videorama company and what has been described as a merry-go-round called the Carnarvon Group. The Operation Manna report states:

In 1982 it was discovered that the cash laundering for the Shellim/Gajic combine was also identical to the cash laundering syndicate for the Gold/MacCready groups.

MacCready was sentenced to gaol for attempting to spring someone from Pentridge. The report continues:

Sitting, as if by accident between these groups was the crime empire of Mark Alfred Clarkson. His lieutenant, Gary Wayne Alpert appeared to cut into both sides of this arrangement, together with his own syndicate based on the almost extinct Falkiner Holdings Limited.

Further the personages sitting immediately to the right and to the left of Alpert in the Falkiner hierarchy presented a strange picture, for they incorporated:

(a) The failure of Trustees Executors Agency, and subsequent criminal proceedings.

(b) The failure of Australian Asiatic and the subsequent criminal proceedings.

The failures of a, b & c represent over $30 million in lost and missing assets.

If we then add the failure of the Alpert enterprises in the period June 1979 to August 1986, we look at a figure of $47.4 million, adding to that the share of the TEA loss attributable to this group, we see a loss of $92 million.

Whilst it is not all a cash loss, the breakdown shows: $27.80 million in cash and securities, and the balance being in property manipulation and share price fixing.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .