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No penalties for Chris Ellison, Mineral Resources as ASIC ends alleged tax evasion probe
ASIC to take no action against MinRes, Chris Ellison after probe by Mark Wembridge
The corporate regulator has ended its investigation into share trading and governance issues at Mineral Resources, saying it will not pursue any action against the iron ore and lithium miner or its billionaire founder Chris Ellison.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission began the investigation into MinRes and its managing director in 2024 after The Australian Financial Review reported that Ellison had established and run a 10-year tax evasion scheme that enriched him and three other executives, but cost shareholders more than $7 million.
Corporate governance has come under scrutiny at Mineral Resources, headed by Chris Ellison. Trevor Collens
The regulator’s inquiries expanded to focus on share trading around Kali Metals, a lithium minnow whose initial public offering was heavily bought by Ellison and MinRes staff.
On Tuesday, MinRes told investors that the regulator had informed the company that it had “concluded its investigation and determined that it will not take any enforcement action”. ASIC confirmed that its investigation had ended.
“ASIC conducted extensive inquiries, and after assessing the available evidence, it has determined that no regulatory action is warranted and the investigation is now closed,” the regulator said in a statement on Tuesday
Ellison’s behaviour – including his use of offshore tax havens and misuse of company resources – was also the target of a separate probe by the Australian Taxation Office. The New Zealand-born businessman admitted to defrauding MinRes shareholders and taxpayers, and promised shareholders that he would step down as managing director by the middle of this year.
ASIC investigators probed share trading in Kali Metals that saw MinRes buy millions of shares in the lithium aspirant’s first days of trading, sending its stock soaring. Some early shareholders, including Ellison’s mother-in-law Jennifer Robinson, sold some or all of their stock and pocketed big profits.
The Financial Review is not suggesting those who acquired Kali shares engaged in any wrongdoing, only that ASIC investigated these matters.
Although the company has hinted that new chief operating officer Darren Killeen was being groomed to replace Ellison, the timeline for his departure has been ditched, and he remains in charge of the diversified miner.
When Ellison’s misdeeds came to light, major superannuation funds such as AustralianSuper and HESTA either dumped their stock or cut their holdings, taking the broader market along with them.
Six directors quit the board in the months after the probes were launched, including all three members of an ethics and governance committeethat was created to oversee Ellison’s behaviour and improve the miner’s culture.
Since then, MinRes has appointed former packaging executive Malcolm Bundey as its chairman, and said it has imposed tighter checks on potential conflicts of interest and related-party transactions.
MinRes shares have rebounded from lows of $14 in April 2025 to recent highs around $70, and AustralianSuper has returned as the miner’s second-largest shareholder, behind Ellison.
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Five Outrageous Things Trump’s New Attorney General Has Already
The New Republic – It didn’t take Todd Blanche long to take a wrecking ball to long-standing Department of Justice principles. “In just his first week in office, Todd Blanche has inflictedmore damage on the norms and traditions of the Department of Justice than any attorney general in its history. I don’t say this casually, and I’m not ignoring the competition.
John Mitchell ran Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks and went to federal prison for it. A. Mitchell Palmer used the DOJ to round up and deport thousands of people for their politics. Harry Daugherty turned it into a vehicle for graft, his cronies selling pardons and immunities like so many indulgences, earning the DOJ the nickname “the Department of easy virtue.”
These evil deeds damaged the department, but they were furtive and ended in disgrace. None of these men served up his conduct as a model for the DOJ to follow. Blanche, by contrast, has openly taken a blowtorch to standards that have been articles of faith at the department for 50 years. Puffed up with his Senate confirmation, President Trump’s former personal lawyer has taken on a renewed cockiness—arrogance, really—and proclaimed his and Trump’s perverted view of the attorney general as the new normal. Consider these five separate betrayals of the department’s ideals.
1. Asked by Kristen Welker on Meet the Press whether he could pledge that the Justice Department would always act independently of the White House, Blanche was combative: “No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that.” That gratuitous added sentence disparages the canonical approach of every attorney general for at least the last half-century. Most of them made the very pledge Blanche now declares inappropriate, and all of them lived by it. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s very first attorney general, swore that the department’s actions “will not be improperly influenced by political considerations” and that it “can never be used to retaliate politically against opponents.”
Michael Mukasey, the conservative Republican attorney general brought in by President George W. Bush in 2007 to clean up the U.S. attorney firing scandals, told the Senate that staff who discussed cases with political actors would be fired. Merrick Garland put the principle most concisely at his own confirmation hearing in 2021: “I’m not the president’s lawyer. I am the United States’s lawyer.” Blanche has now breezily declared that all of these predecessors in office were misguided in their fundamental approach to the job and justice…”
