Sunday 27 May 2012

The Thomson Saga: Just how unlucky can a person be?






      Craig Thomson
       circa 2003-2005








The Northern Leader 25 May 2012:

Records obtained by the Herald indicate a $770 fee was charged to Mr Thomson's HSU credit card on May 7, 2005. The transaction was billed to ''Internat Immobiliare''.

So what is known about this corporation?

Well ASIC lists four companies with similar names:

83526612
ORG
INTERNATIONAL IMMOBILIARE PTY. LIMITED.

106620900
ORG
INTERNATIONAL IMMOBILIARE PTY LTD

146891778
ORG
INTERNATIONAL IMMOBILIARE PTY LIMITED

118001415
ORG
INTERNATIONAL IMMOBILIARI (AUSTRALIA) PTY LIMITED

The first company on the list was under a court-ordered liquidation which commenced in 2001 and was eventually deregistered on 1 October 2003.
In October 2003 the second company was registered eight days later and deregistered on 15 March 2008. It has no documents lodged on the ASIC website after its registration document. However the ASIC Gazette lists INTERNATIONAL IMMOBILIARE PTY LTD ACN 106 620 900 as a deregistered company on 31 January 2006.
The third wasn’t registered until 18 October 2010.
While the fourth wasn’t registered until 23 January 2006.

There are also two International Immobiliare Limited - one registered in New Zealand and the other in Britain.

Now if the Internat Immobiliare mentioned in the media was actually a holding company associated with a Sydney escort agency; if this name also represents one of the companies listed by ASIC; and if allegedly the name did turn up as a debit on a Health Services Union credit card account in 2005 – then one would have to be very unlucky to have had the transaction occur in what was the last seven months this company was trading.

Doubly unlucky would best describe anyone who in patronising Internat Immobiliare’s escort agency did not realise that they were also using a business which had a reputation for disputed dalliance claims about its workers and ‘famous’ people and, in at least one case in 2004, a worker had allegedly received a large sum from a media outlet to tell the story.

Terminally unlucky is a phrase which springs to mind when one considers there were also allegations of the agency’s books being cooked by management sometime between 2003 and 2008.

At the same time one might characterize a journalist who found credit card documents  pertaining to a long-defunct company strewn across his investigative path - records which at least two police investigations and a Fair Work Australia investigation apparently failed to find - as nothing less than an incredibily fortunate member of the Fourth Estate.

Indeed Lady Luck has been staggering across the public square in such a way as to make one suspect that she is more than a little inebriated.

However, not quite as inebriated as Channel Nine's A Current Affair which appears to be relying on the memory of a former sex worker, who allegedly met a union official once seven years ago (before he lost weight, his hair went gray and that bald patch developed) and was willing to indentify him this year from a photograph - in exchange for an undisclosed payment.

** The former owner of this escort agency apparently now resides near Mission Beach in New Zealand where he is still finding his way into the news and the New Zealand woman interviewed by A Current Affair is believed to be living in Cabarita Beach area on the NSW North Coast.

2 comments:

Patriciawa said...

Point well made! Craig Thomson then and now! Quite apart from the very dubious nature of the agency, and the 'luck' of happening on the very sex worker who serviced him way back then!

Anonymous said...

Well it all amounts to not much doesn't it.