John Karantzis: amateur historian

The Sideshow Bob of corporate Australia’s cartoonish directors sends yet another rake handle flying into his face.

Michael RoddanNational correspondent

Dec 1, 2022 – 5.22pm

John Karantzis is a modern marvel, a man born devoid of shame.

It’s hard to know who is more delusional: the former boss of iSignthis (since renamed Southern Cross Payments) who spent years promising a $464 million payday from his lawsuit against the ASX for suspending his company, or his shareholders who believed him – right up to the point when the case was, entirely foreseeably, abandoned last month.

Karantzis is the Sideshow Bob of corporate Australia’s cartoonish directors, each step he takes sends yet another rake handle flying into his face. His lawyers, HWL Ebsworth, are more than happy to go along for the ride.

Which takes us to this newspaper’s August examination of the early escapades of Karantzis’ new Cyprus-based iSignthis spin-off, ISX Financial EU Plc, which was recently ensnared in the collapse of one of Europe’s largest Ponzi schemes: the cannabis investing platform Juicy Fields.

ISX Financial in July sent out a scam alert on Twitter telling customers not to trust details published to a website that alleged ISX Pay transfer accounts were linked to the Juicy Fields scam, warning: “ISX is mentioned on this URL but is not involved.”

That was an odd thing to say, given investors in the scheme were directed to deposit funds into two banks, one of which was ISX Pay.

Indeed, when this newspaper approached Karantzis, he clarified the tweeted warning was about an “additional scam and fake website”. Nevertheless, he went on to heroically claim, in no uncertain terms, that: “ISX has been instrumental in alerting authorities regarding JuicyFields activities.” Hmm.

Bearing all that in mind, we thought it odd that LexisNexis, which syndicates global newspaper articles for its comprehensive information database, recently notified Nine (the publisher of this paper) that it had been asked by ISX Financial EU Plc to remove the story.

In its reasoning, ISX Financial claimed The Australian Financial Review was “adding credibility to an unsubstantiated opinion article by presenting its opinions as fact”.

“The contents of the media report are speculative, and the Company has not been made aware of any ‘class action’ or otherwise by any law firm or court filing in any jurisdiction. Further, the Company is not the subject of any investigation of which we are aware, and the Company has not faced any regulatory sanction, fine or control.”

Putting aside the reality that the original article was a news article, not unsubstantiated opinion, Karantzis himself admitted to not only the thrust of the yarn, but the entirety of it.

Not only did he confirm ISX had transferred investor funds to Juicy Fields, he also certified his meeting with two directors of Juicy Fields in July, and detailed how he’d been “engaged with law enforcement agencies for some time, at our own instigation”. There’s genius, then there’s Karantzis, inhabiting a plane of cerebral existence all on his own.

While ISX Financial may claim ignorance of any class action, Spanish law firm Martínez-Blanco Abogados in September filed an action in the national court against Juicy Fields representing consumers allegedly defrauded in the scheme, and Lars Olofsson, the lawyer this newspaper quoted in its original article, last month said he was preparing evidence for a case.

If this doesn’t sufficiently render false ISX’s assertion it isn’t subject to any investigation, lest we forget the ongoing Australian Securities and Investments Commission case in the Federal Court against iSignthis and Karantzis, who the regulator is seeking to ban from directing companies.

And how could we forget the Australian Taxation Office’s ongoing pursuit of Karantzis over his $10 million unpaid tax bill (which he is disputing, to great comic effect), or the ATO’s subsequent review of iSignthis’ tax returns, “including the [ISX Financial] demerger transaction”, from 2017 to 2021, which was launched late last year.

If there’s a regulatory body Karantzis hasn’t provoked, we’d love to hear about it.

ISX Financial told LexisNexis our paper was also the “subject of successful defamation proceedings ... and also for misleading and deceptive statements by our previous parent company, iSignthis”.

Well, it may be true we’ve lost defamation cases before. But not from actions brought by Karantzis (who settled and discontinued a case against us in 2020), nor any cases regarding misleading or deceptive statements, which haven’t been brought by anyone, let alone iSignthis.

Rather, it is ASIC that has accused iSignthis of false and misleading representations and “Karantzis’ involvement in those alleged breaches”, including breaches of his directors’ duties and “his failure to take reasonable steps to ensure information that he gave to ASX was not false or misleading”.

Karantzis couldn’t even be arsed to declare to the ATO his $200,000 salary at iSignthis, despite the figures being publicly available in annual reports.

What a schmuck!