ISX CEO - JOHN KARANTZIS v FAIRFAX MEDIA PUBLICATIONS (Mr Joe Aston), page-247

From The AFR

Three long months have elapsed since we last updated our readers on the activities of shadowy fintech iSignthis and its obstreperous founder, John Karantzis.

Add some more zeros JK to the claim


Last time we wrote, iSignthis had just filed an amended statement of claim in its lawsuit against the Australian Securities Exchange seeking a ludicrous $524 million in damages and the reinstatement of its shares, which have been suspended since October 2019 (counterintuitively, iSignthis is at the same time authorising itself to delist itself from the ASX).

We'll see what we see in court

John Karantzis went to extraordinary lengths to withhold his correspondence with Visa. How so? Pretty sure there still would've been privacy concerns

In that Federal Court filing, iSignthis contended that as a result of the ASX publishing its reasons for iSignthis’ suspension, iSignthis lost €1 million in business from Insight Group OÜ. Hilariously, as we explained in great detail, Insight Group OÜ is an international financial scammer.
Is this based on his intimate knowledge of everything?

In its third amended statement of claim of October 7, iSignthis threw in claimed lost profits of £84.4 million over four years from UK settling bank Clearbank, which also declined to do business with iSignthis. This must be news to Clearbank, whose total revenues last year were only £5.3 million!
Joey, ever heard of Covid19

The ASX then released another compendium of communications with iSignthis to the market on October 26, then filed its own amended defence on November 11. Those Federal Court pleadings reveal the extraordinary lengths Karantzis took to withhold his bombshell correspondence with payments giant Visa from the independent expert reviewing – at the ASX’s direction – all of iSignthis’ contracts and the efficacy of its continuous disclosures processes.Visa suspended iSignthis from its network in writing on March 6 and terminated iSignthis in writing on April 17. After a flurry of subsequent emails in which Karantzis (just for a change) argued the point, Visa wrote a May 12 letter entitled “ISX Termination – Final response” confirming that “Visa has not altered its decision to terminate the relationship with iSignthis”. Yet iSignthis did not disclose the termination of its contract with Visa to the ASX until May 25 and Karantzis never provided Visa’s letters to the independent expert (Clayton Utz partners Michael Linehan and Brendan Groves) who commenced scrutinising, gently, iSignthis’ contract ledger on May 19.
Can someone throw this clown a life preserver

In its October 26 market disclosure, the ASX only produced excerpts of the Visa letters, including Visa’s conclusion that “iSignthis is not operating appropriate programs to manage anti-money laundering and risk” and “apparently still does not understand when investigations of suspicious merchant behaviour is required”. Here’s hoping the ASX will read the full particulars of this suspicious merchant behaviour into evidence at trial.
Visa releasing private details to ASIC and then onto ASX, forgot that little gem Joey

The extreme recalcitrance of iSignthis in disclosing its estrangement from one of the two major global card schemes only naturally makes us wonder how its commercial relationship is going with the other, being MasterCard.
Quite well actually

Both iSignthis’ Australian and European payment services providers were, until September, listed on Mastercard’s website on its register of payment facilitators by region. They are no longer.You might recall that iSignthis said on April 29 that it was suspended by Visa “for parts of March pending response to Visa re: queries on ASX ‘investigation’, concerns re: ‘derogatory media’ and the focus on high-risk merchants” all while Visa’s website showed it was suspended by Visa’s anti-money laundering division.Now, the disappearance of iSignthis Australia from MasterCard’s Asia-Pacific register of facilitators might be explained by the termination of the relationship with its MasterCard acquirer, First Data (now Fiserv), back in March. It gave iSignthis six months’ notice.But that can’t explain the evaporation from the European list of the Cyprus-based iSignthis Money, which by virtue of its e-money licence, was there under its own steam.This newspaper has put multiple requests for more information to MasterCard, which declined to clarify the status of any contractual relationships with iSignthis in either region.
Why would Mastercard give you any info. Have you not understood European privacy laws

iSignthis spokesman Mark Hawthorne said on October 26 there were “no issues” with iSignthis’ MasterCard relationship.Funnily enough, in its third statement of claim, iSignthis even blames the ASX for Hawthorne’s fees of $159,836.71 (excluding GST) from October 2019 and August 2020. Given the delusional sums racked up to others, it beats us why he didn’t add a few more zeros.
Really, I mean really. Enjoy your day in court sunshine