Well done for getting out with a loss, rather than digging your heels in against your better judgement mate. It's a hard lesson to learn that that's necessary at times, regardless of how obvious it may seem.
A decent share of the fuel that allows these scams to continue comes from investors who refuse to acknowledge that. The rest comes from the seemingly endless supply of naive (and I don't mean that in a nasty or even necessarily critical way) investors who somewhat understandably believe that the ASIC and ASX wouldn't allow such things to occur.
One of the most important controls in my investing is the list of directors who were involved in the failures I've lost on. I will never invest in a company that any of them are associated with again, no matter how much I like anything else about it. If I'm already invested in a company and one of those people is appointed, I'm getting out as fast as I can.
The only exceptions to the above are the handful of epic failures I keep in my portfolio to remind me of the mistakes I've made in the past. They're all unmarketable parcels and I've declined to sell them even when facilities have been offered, just so they're always there to remind me, haha. I'm happy to wait until they're liquidated to take the CGT offset.
I'd bet the Mitchell/Mills deal was carefully orchestrated over shareholder funded silver service food and bevvies. I wonder what their friends and families think. I'd be ashamed and embarrassed.
