Complaint Review: David Hambleton

I have just recently returned to Australia and was shocked and horrified to see David Hambleton acting as a liquidator in Brisbane. Here is my story of what this man did to me -

In 2003 David Hambleton (who was a very close friend of my family) encouraged me to invest half a million dollars in the company he was the manager of called Knights Involvency Services. I realise I was stupid to do it but Hambleton went to the the same college as me being St. Josephs College in Nudgee and his family was good friends with my family so I thought he could be trusted as he told me he would tell me everything about the company so I would know if there was ever going to be a problem. 

I invested the half a million dollars which got me a million shares in the company when it listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in June 2003. The prospectus portrayed them as a very successful and professional accountancy and insolvency business who were checked by the Australian Government regularly to ensure their legitimacy.

The prospectus said the company had seen 45% growth per year for the last four years and were forecasting revenue of 16 million dollars and a dividend of four and a half cents for the following financial year being 2003/2004 which meant my shares would have a 9 percent yield. I would have been happy with half of that so it all seemed foolproof.

They had offices in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide as well as a lot of regional offices so it all seemed so professional and we were told they were expanding to New Zealand, England and Malaysia as well as opening more Australian offices.

Of course it all turned out to be too good to be true. The whole set-up was a sham with false assets having been listed in the prospectus and the company structured in such a way that it was just basically fraudulent. Of course within a year or two the company made a 3 million dollar loss, 6.7 million dollars worth of work they had stated they had was found to be false and it was found they were working for companies that had no money but they had listed all this money (that they knew they would never get) as assets. The person behind all this fraud was none other than my family friend David Hambleton. He ran the whole show and set it all up while the major players sat back and raked in the money as they were getting paid large amounts of money for doing nothing and Hambleton was being paid a fortune as well.

The company operated for two years from when I gave them my money. It collected $19 million dollars and spend $29 million dollars on operations (including the large wages to David Hambleton).

It all came crashing down in April 2005 when the offices of Knights Insolvency Services was raided by the Australian Federal Police and David Hambleton was questioned for several days by them and then he fled for England where he refused to cooperate with the Federal Police any further and it appears his trick worked as his "boss" but really his partner, Trevor John Schmierer, was still in jail as late as 2015. David Hambleton walked away free as a bird with honest, hard working people's money.

I now have nothing. David Hambleton is incredibly running the same sort of business as detailed above. 

It seriously takes the lowest of the low to do what David Hambleton did to me.

I warn anyone doing business with this man to be incredibly careful and if you are unlucky enough to be owed money by a company that Hambleton is liquidating I assure you that you will get nothing. Change liquidators as fast as you can as he will suck every single cent out of the company for himself.