Exclusive: Kris Ridgway promised investors huge profits – and never paid a cent. This is his confession
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.For years, Kris Ridgway lived a double life. There was the charismatic, fast-talking financial adviser whose family loved him, clients trusted and friends envied.
It is part of a year-long media investigation into a global investment scheme - supposedly backed by billions of dollars in assets - that is still in play and has embroiled potentially thousands of investors from Australia, the United States, Britain, New Zealand, China and the Middle East.The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has been investigating Ridgway, and the scheme, for more than a year but has done little, despite evidence of unethical conduct and breaches of the law.
The investments are based in opaque tax havens, making it virtually impossible to trace the relationship between the different entities and, ultimately, the underlying assets. Six months later he became concerned about the existence, value and ownership of the assets. When he asked Turner and Sutton for certain details, he says he was stonewalled. He left, still owed $250,000 in unpaid salary.
He was paid 17 per cent in secret commissions via one of Sutton’s companies, pocketing at least $1.6 million, which he used to fund an extravagant lifestyle that included overseas family holidays, private school fees and suits befitting a senior adviser at a top-tier wealth management company. “And sometimes I’d go there to see Kris and I could hear him talking about Steppes [one of the products] out the back with other clients who were doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in terms of transfers.”
It was 2016 and Reynolds says he emphasised, again and again, “what I want for you, Leith, is to have your own house again, your own apartment, your own space”. “We’d get the reports of what the shares were now worth,” she says. “Which is what kept us all there, probably, kept us all quiet.”Jason Hermann blew the whistle to Shaw and Partners when Ridgway did not sell his shares.Jason Hermann, a father of two young children, lost his home, along with savings of more than $200,000, and is riddled with debt thanks to Ridgway.
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