Billionaire businessman Clive Palmer has appealed to the High Court of Australia in a bid to halt criminal proceedings brought by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) involving allegations of fraud and dishonesty. The charges relate to his company Mineralogy Pty Ltd and his Leisure Coolum resort in Queensland.
ASIC filed complaints against Palmer and his resort in 2018 and 2020, alleging that Palmer dishonestly used his position as a director of Mineralogy to benefit the Palmer United Party. One set of charges concerns a proposal to buy out investors in timeshare villas at the Coolum resort, which did not eventuate. ASIC claims Palmer and his company were required to make a takeover bid within two months of announcing it but failed to do so.
In another matter, Palmer was charged in 2020 with two counts of dishonestly using his position as a director and fraudulently gaining a benefit. This relates to his transfer of more than $12 million through Mineralogy between 5 August and 5 September 2013. ASIC alleges the money was transferred to bank accounts held by Media Circus and Cosmo Developments, ultimately for the benefit of the Palmer United Party to fund its 2013 federal election campaign.
Palmer, who has denied any wrongdoing, has unsuccessfully asked the Queensland Supreme Court and the state's Court of Appeal to stop the prosecutions. In an application for special leave to appeal to the High Court, filed on Tuesday, Palmer argues that the criminal proceedings relate to interparty transactions and purport to controvert findings made in earlier civil proceedings involving the same parties.
In earlier civil cases, Palmer argued that Mineralogy was entitled to receive payment from the bank account as its own money and to pay money out for its own purposes. He rejected the Court of Appeal's reasoning that there were circumstantial matters pointing to dishonesty. In February 2024, Justice Jean Dalton of the Court of Appeal said Palmer had failed to demonstrate that either prosecution was doomed to fail, and described the delay caused by attempts to permanently stay criminal proceedings as an abuse of the court's process.
