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Aspiring pub baron Jon Adgemis once lived a gilt-plated life.
The former KPMG rainmaker (he made partner aged 28) cruised Sydney’s eastern suburbs in a black Maserati, entertained associates on a luxury Italian vintage yacht, arrived at the Melbourne Cup by helicopter, and paraded a series of glamorous Birkin-toting girlfriends at society events.
Then the good times came crashing down. The Australian Taxation Office began circling his debt-fuelled businesses, before eventually forcing them into bankruptcy last October owing $1.8 billion. This week, liquidators from BRI Ferrier spent days picking through the wreckage at a Federal Court examination, and the details weren’t pretty.
The yacht, Hiilani, has been sold to pay Adgemis’ debts. So have most of the cars. Model Cheyenne Tozzi, who split from Adgemis in 2017, has been asked to give evidence at the examination, which this week has finally shed some light on the billion-dollar mystery of how Adgemis’ Public Hospitality Group collapsed.
After leaving KPMG, Adgemis set his sights on building an entertainment empire to rival that of another perma-tanned eastern suburbs playboy, Merivale’s Justin Hemmes.
He made a bet on Australia’s post-pandemic appetite for pleasure, buying up 22 entertainment venues in Sydney and Melbourne. Crucially, he made the bet using others’ money, fuelling his purchases with cheap debt from investors wooed by unrealistic valuations.
The finer details of how Public Hospitality collapsed are particularly damning. In documents supplied to the court, the ATO said it was examining about $1 billion in spending incurred by one of Adgemis’ companies, alleging that it had received $77 million in GST refunds as part of a sham tax arrangement.
Alexander Andruska, a Woollahra councillor and a long-term Adgemis lieutenant said that those refunds were essential to running the business. He alleged that his former boss had used that money to fund his exorbitant lifestyle.
“It was very stressful. I wanted to bloody blow my brains out,” Andruska said of trying to manage Adgemis’ finances.
Accountant Sam Stringer, who was engaged by Adgemis after an audit by the ATO, told the court that the companies were not in a good financial position, and that trying to lodge their tax returns was a “mammoth” task.
“We were given very little information. They were extremely disorganised and impossible to get information from,” he said.
On Monday, Damien Hodgkinson, a co-founder of teal independent bank-roller Climate200 and an associate of Adgemis’ since their time as KPMG partners, was in court. The court heard that the pair had conspired to install Adgemis’ friend Marco Bettelli as sole director of Linchpin, a supposedly separate company that began operating some Public Hospitality Group venues amid financial troubles last year.
While several of Adgemis’ associates were grilled by the liquidator’s barrister Michael Rose, the man at the centre was conspicuously absent.
Adgemis spent just seconds in the witness box, before his lawyers moved a motion to have the matter set aside as an abuse of process and to have the liquidators’ solicitors, ERA Legal, barred from acting. If Adgemis’ examination proceeds, his lawyers want it conducted in secret, away from the prying eyes of the media, a move that is being challenged by news organisations including this masthead.
