Chapter Twenty-Four: The Hole in the Middle

Now put three facts beside each other, because the whole moral architecture of this book stands or falls on them.

Fact one. In 2016 the Federal Court declared five land banking developments operated by Jamie and Dennis McIntyre to be unregistered managed investment schemes. Bromwich J banned both brothers from managing companies for ten years. Around a hundred and fifty-two investors had put in roughly seven million dollars.

Fact two. Liquidators — Deloitte among them — were unable to locate more than seven million dollars outlaid on options across those five schemes.

Unable to locate.

Not "recovered a portion of." Not "traced to a failed development."

Could not find it.

Fact three. In 2009 — while those schemes were running, while Marion Dalgety was ringing every quarter — a four-point-seven-five-million-dollar waterfront mansion was purchased on the Isle of Capri on the Gold Coast, and it became the most notorious party house in Queensland.

And around it, a boat.

Put them on one page. Seven million dollars that professional liquidators cannot find, and a mansion, and a vessel — in the same years, in the same postcodes, in the same family's orbit.

Jamie McIntyre's answer, given a hundred times in a hundred forms, was always structurally identical: different entity, different funding, different time, nothing to do with each other, and the fact that you are drawing a line between them proves you're running a smear campaign.

And the novel's answer is that he never once produced the document that would settle it.

Not to the Senate. Not to the liquidators. Not to a journalist. Not to the Federal Court. Not in twenty-five years, across ten websites and a thousand posts and four lawsuits announced and never filed.

One ledger. That's all it would ever have taken.

One ledger showing where seven million dollars went.

It has never existed in public.

And the reason it has never existed in public is the same reason a man announces a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar action against a regulator and does not file it:

Filing means discovery. Discovery means the statements.