What an interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald...

What an interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald Business Section on Saturday about Steve Vizard, MUL & Ballintine.

Apparently in 2000, MUL, led by Ballintine 'cut a deal' with Vizard by giving him $2.7m worth of MUL options to become a Director of MUL, at the expense of MULs forever suffering shareholders.

Cunning Vizard quickly exercised enough options within 8 days of becoming a MUL director to make $1.1m.

But wait...there's more.....Vizard didn't advise the market of what he'd done for more than 5 months after selling the MUL shares.......obviously so the market wouldn't know about it. Under ASIC rules, directors must advise the market with 14 days of trades in their own company.

What did ASIC do....NOTHING ?

But at least the Minister responsible for Telstra forced Vizard off the Telstra Board when he found out about this scam.

Ballintine, when asked last week by the press to comment about what Vizard had done, pleaded that it had never been agreed to by the MUL Board for Vizard to immediately convert his options to shares and then sell nearly half of them the moment he joined the MUL Board, and that he felt like a dummy when it became public knowledge - yeah right ???????

Ballintine must think the MUL shareholders, the market, ASIC, and ASX are the dummies to believe such crap.

Ballintine receives a Computershare update every 3 days which would have told him just 3 days after Vizard had sold the shares that he had done so. Why didn't Ballintine say something to Vizard, to the ASX, to ASIC, to the MUL shareholders, to Nigel - his Yacht captain, to someone?????????

Just look at MULs ever escalating litany of crummy deals, pathetic corporate strategies, missed forecasts, broken promises, ASX negative rulings, and $70+ million losses and rising, and you get a true picture of what to believe about Ballintine - actions speak louder than words.

I'd suggest that a new piece of art fiction is being created in Australian corporate history : "The Portrait of Adrian Maxwell Ballintine" - which has a doppelganger - "The Portrait of Dorian Gray".

Methinks that with Ballintine making such rdiculous official comments to the media such as the SMH, he is very soon going to see his own portrait - the horror...the horror.