Found this using Google:- Fund manager Brian Osborne has...

Found this using Google:-
Fund manager Brian Osborne has launched legal action against fintech IPO hopeful Credit Clear and one of its founders, Mark Casey, who he claims wrongly tipped him out of the company and cancelled his shares in it.
Mr Osborne, a former director of specialist lender Banner Asset Management, claims Mr Casey, the brother of former Richmond AFL club president Clinton Casey, also pushed him out of a potentially lucrative property development in Byron Bay that was projected to reap as much as $330 million in profit. In a Victorian Supreme Court lawsuit lodged a fortnight ago, Mr Osborne claims the conduct of the affairs of Credit Clear, which is backed by investors including the Waislitz family, and a string of companies behind the Byron Bay project have been “oppressive to or unfairly prejudicial, or discriminatory against” him.
He told the court he was wrongly sacked by Mr Casey for “gross negligence” in January.
Mr Osborne has asked the court to order his shares in the companies be reinstated or bought out. Failing that, they should be put in receivership, he said in an originating process filed with the court.
He also wants Mr Casey’s company, Casey Capital, to make a loan to him of $2.5m as part of a deal he claims to have struck to reduce his stake in the Byron Bay project from 25 per cent to 15 per cent.
The lawsuit follows a capital raising by Credit Clear last month that reaped $8.5m from investors including the Waislitz family’s Thorney group in a series A raising and comes ahead of a mooted IPO, pencilled in for next year.
A spokeswoman for Credit Clear said the company rejected the allegations.
“The company is aware of proceedings filed by Mr Brian Osborne and his entities,” the spokeswoman told The Australian.
“The company denies all the allegations made by Mr Osborne and his entities and the company will defend these proceedings vigorously.”
Mr Casey declined to comment because the matter was before the court.
Credit Clear was founded in mid-2016 by Mr Casey and SpotJobs co-founder Lewis Romano to act as an online debt collection service for individuals and businesses. The company boasts an advisory board that includes Google’s regional head of Android Neal French and AOPEN chief digital officer Stephen Borg.
Mr Casey, who in 2016 raked in $14m from the sale of a sheep farm near Geelong, serves as Credit Clear’s chairman and funded the start-up himself until last month, when he announced he would be joined by a new group of investment partners including Regal Funds Management and Thorney.
Company documents show the capital raising made the new investors the majority owners of Credit Clear.
Mr Romano, who is setting up the company’s New York office, told The Australian at the time the company had received an “incredible response from sophisticated high-net-worth individuals and institutional investors who quickly understood the problem we are solving and the immense scalability of Credit Clear.”
Alex Waislitz said Thorney Technologies Limited was an early investor in listed fintech company Afterpay and saw many parallels with Credit Clear. “Thorney likes the tech space in general and the fintech space in particular,” he said. “Credit Clear has a good disruptive and scalable business model and it is already being used successfully by a number of the companies that we hold shares in. If they can continue to scale at the rate they have been without major setbacks then they have a bright future in front of them.”
The company appointed a new managing director last November, poaching Simon Scalzo from rival start-up Openpay, which itself was preparing for an IPO that it later postponed. Mr Scalzo had been in that role for just nine months.
In an affidavit filed with the court, Mr Osborne said that in January last year he struck a deal with Mr Casey and Credit Clear under which he would be paid $40,000 a month to run the company and receive a shareholding of 15 per cent.
Company documents show Mr Osborne was issued with more than 12.4 million shares, worth about $817,000 at the valuation of 6.5c a share implied by last month’s capital raising.
He was also to receive a share of between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of “future projects”, including the Byron Bay project.
The land subdivision, at Lennox Head, about 35km south of Byron Bay, “has been valued by a commercial valuer … at $95m, and was estimated by Casey to generate approximately $330m in profit in the next ten years”, Mr Osborne said in his affidavit. He said that in December last year, as part of an effort to lure new investment in the Byron Bay project, he struck a deal with Mr Casey to reduce his shareholding in the venture from 25 to 15 per cent.
In return, Casey Capital was to lend his company, Wilborne Holdings, $2.5m at 8 per cent a year.
But in January Mr Casey emailed him, “advising that he was terminating my agreement with the Casey Group effective immediately for reasons of gross negligence,” he said.
He told the court that since then his shares in Credit Clear and the Byron Bay companies had been cancelled and he has not received the $2.5m.
The case is set for a directions hearing on August 10.