The former chief executive of failed tech company Big Un Limited has been charged with insider trading amid an investigation by the corporate regulator, after the collapse of what was once one of the ASX’s hottest tech companies. Richard Evans, the father of Big Un founder Brandon Evertz, appeared via his lawyer in the Downing Centre Local Court on Tuesday charged with insider trading, with ASIC alleging the executive communicated inside information about Big Un to a shareholder on or around 10 January 2017.
The executive, also known as Richard Evertz, now faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted, and allegedly communicated information about a $20m funding arrangement with ‘Finstro’, a product of Sydney-based financier First Class Capital, along with information about the number of customers who had been onboarded to purchase Big Un’s promotional ‘TV Show’ package at a cost of $12,000.
Big Un, founded as a teenager by Brandon Evertz, offered a service for shooting and packaging online video reviews for small businesses, invoicing them $399 for videos it hosted on its ‘Big Review TV’ platform. Some businesses paid as much as $12,000 for the company’s services. When Big Un listed on the ASX through a reverse takeover of Republic Gold in 2014, Mr Evertz was the youngest boss of an ASX-listed company, and in 2017 Big Un was the top-performing stock on the ASX. It was worth as much as $700m before its collapse in scandal in 2018.
The company subsequently admitted it had paid a 24 per cent commission to its sponsorship partner First Class Capital as part of a secretive financing model that had made its sales appear more impressive than they actually were. The company ultimately collapsed later that year, also admitting it had inadvertently breached ASX rules by not announcing an agreement to issue shares. Listing rules require a company to notify the market of a proposed issue of new shares. Its actions, along with those of fellow listed tech entity Getswift, led the ASX to change its rules in March 2018.
Richard Evans, then-named Richard Evertz, resigned from the company in 2018 amid revelations that years earlier he had been jailed for blackmailing men in public toilets by impersonating a police officer. “The matter is being prosecuted by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions following a referral from ASIC,” the regulator said in a statement on Tuesday. Brandon Evertz said in 2015 that his start-up was undervalued. “If you look at the tech companies in our space, we feel our company is extremely undervalued,” Brandon Evertz said in 2015. “We’re bringing in revenues when a lot of other tech companies just aren’t. We’ll continue to innovate in the video space, that’s where we think the future of the internet is.”
In 2022 Big Un’s former auditor, Graham Swan, was convicted for failing to conduct the company’s audit in compliance with auditing standards. Mr Swan was ordered to pay a penalty of $2000 and has voluntarily cancelled his registration as a company auditor, for initially signing off on financial results in October 2017 that claimed Big Un had posted cash revenue up 429 per cent year-on-year, with cash and cash equivalents of $9.2m. ASIC said its investigation concerning Big Un and its officers and executives is ongoing.
