ARTICLES LIKE THIS IN THE AFR DONT HELP AT ALL EITHER!!!! HE...

ARTICLES LIKE THIS IN THE AFR DONT HELP AT ALL EITHER!!!! HE NEEDS TO BE REMOVED!!!

All in the family for Bert Mondello’s Emerge Gaming

It’s been just eight months since this newspaper took a hard look at the relationship between ASX-listed Emerge Gaming and global parasitic entity Crowd1.Relationships are, of course, quotidian in the business of multi-level marketing, the polite name for (legally acceptable) networks that resemble pyramid schemes.Emerge Gaming chairman Bert Mondello. Jez RozdarzNinety-eight per cent of Emerge Gaming’s revenue was derived from funnelling cash for Crowd1 (the subject of consumer warnings from more than a dozen global regulators). Three weeks after the Financial Review’s coverage of this, Emerge told investors it would divest the main pipe for these funds: its embarrassingly clunky e-sports platform known as Miggster.

In March, Emerge Gaming announced a deal to sell Miggster to a Swedish-based company called Nibiru e-gaming AB for $5 million.Some coincidence then that Nibiru was founded last year with funding from Impact Crowd Technology, the Spanish parent company of Crowd1, and operates a game called Planet IX, which uses the Crowd1 multi-level marketing network to sign up players. Nibiru and Impact Crowd Technologies also share a board member.

Never mind that Crowd1’s revenue comes from credulous huddled masses across Africa and other developing economies, last week Emerge Gaming was celebrating its successful exit from Miggster with the receipt of an initial $1.75 million, with the remaining $3.25 million payable over the next year.So, what does Emerge Gaming CEO Gregory Stevens do next – given last week he handed in his executive notice period and became a non-executive director – with his piercing acumen?

Emerge Gaming CEO Greg Stevens addresses an actor in a Crowd1 promotional video. Stevens, by the by, is entitled to $97,500 of the remaining $3.25 million sale proceeds – only if they are forthcoming. How’s that for a watertight deal?He is also subject to a two-year non-compete clause with, ahem, the “exclusion of the business of Nibiru e-gaming AB or its related bodies corporate”. His bags must already be packed.The saga represents the latest edition of expensive homework for the ASX caused by Bert Mondello, the visionary Emerge Gaming chairman, given the deluge of “please explain” notices the ASX had to issue the company since it got into bed with Crowd1 in September 2020.

The Perth entrepreneur (say no more) was curiously replaced on the board of another ASX microcap, WestStar Industrial, in September last year, less than 24 hours after Emerge Gaming announced the Miggster divestment.His other bolthole is on the board of ASX-listed Douugh, via a reverse takeover of Mondello’s previous (failed) experiment Ziptel, which imploded after it retracted a “landmark” deal with a London-based digital media group that was announced to the ASX.