Push comes to shove as Magnis meeting gets heated for reporting the facts

Magnis’ US managing director, Hoshi Daruwalla.

• 7:00AM DECEMBER 1, 2023

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Corporate Australia’s annual general meetings are best known for their tea and biscuits, not harsh words and the threat of fist fights.

But another sign the Magnis story may have jumped the shark came at the conclusion of the company’s AGM on Thursday.

With visitors blocked from the pokey office in the corner of K&L Gates level 31 in Sydney, Magnis’s AGM was all blue-sky promises and ignoring the flashing warning lights.

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But when it came time to wrap up, one Magnis shareholder, Matthew Boysen, one of the company’s investors, decided the best response to the troubles plaguing the business was to threaten, push and shove this journalist rather than question where $114m had gone in the past four years.

Boysen, owner and operator of a furniture business in Melbourne’s northern suburbs and an investor and sometimes board member in a number of other enterprises involving Magnis’s chair Frank Poullas, repeatedly shoved and threatened this journalist.

Magnis Energy Technologies’ Australian executive chairman, Frank Poullas.

It’s not often in corporate Australia that an AGM concludes with a shareholder attempting to manhandle another attendee in the offices of one of the world’s largest law firms. But Boysen, clad in blue shorts and a black T-shirt, informed this journalist he had spent the AGM taking photos of this “f..king” reporter.

READ MORE: Tangled web of companies behind Magnis failures | Magnis factory leaders depart | We’re solvent and negotiating funds, insists Magnis | Magnis ‘will co-operate’ with new ASIC investigation | Allegations fly over Magnis battery factory coup |

“I’ll come after you, you f..king c..t,” Boysen said.

“Get out of the room, you absolute f..king grub.”

“Get out dickhead, I’ll f..king thump you.”

One shareholder even chimed in, as this journalist was physically thrown out of the AGM: “Support Australian companies.”

Readers may know Magnis as a company that has promised much and delivered little, with repeated assurances of graphite-fed riches flowing from Tanzania and rivers of gold flowing from the Imperium3 NY “Gigafactory”.

Despite all this not a dollar has emerged from the company’s mining and manufacturing operations, with hundreds of millions of shareholder dollars dumped into projects that fail to even whelm.

Perhaps it’s a moment to reflect when a company’s shareholders decide the best response to bad news is to threaten those trying to cover its descent into negative equity.

Boysen, who is also a board director at ASX-listed mining stock Gladiator, is not a stranger to this paper.

Indeed, Boysen reflected upon this when he demanded this journalist stop calling his shop, something resorted to when all else fails.

As has previously been revealed in this paper Boysen has been keen to gloat on the social media platform formerly known as X of his “Disallowed” returns from investments in Adavale, which audit documents show was being bankrolled by Magnis, something directors tried to put a stop to.

Boysen even called questions fired off to his work email “highly unprofessional and intimidatory”.

“Clearly lost the plot,” he said.

This is not tea and biscuits.