No Blue Sky for Mark Sowerby

Last week, the Supreme Court of Queensland approved the abandonment of claims against Nine Entertainment and me in a class action brought by Blue Dog, the private company of Blue Sky Alternative Investments founder Mark Sowerby.

These proceedings were vexatious from the outset. The statement of claim was so poorly drafted that it had to be repleaded repeatedly. Sowerby's allegations against me – that I participated in a pre-meditated conspiracy with short sellers to bring down Blue Sky – were made without any proper basis. 

Ironically, if I had made such spurious allegations of unethical conduct against Sowerby (or anyone else) in an article, I'd have been sued to kingdom come. Yet Sowerby was permitted to make them in court, generate front page coverage of those allegations, waste mountains of our time and the court's resources, and then slink away. What a bum. 

The high point of Sowerby's 'proof' of my conspiracy was that in 2017, multiple sources had emailed me Blue Sky documents and that these documents were later referred to in Glaucus' infamous short report on Blue Sky.[[These emails were discovered in Elaine Stead's successful defamation action against the AFR and me.]] But Sowerby provided no evidence that I gave these documents to Glaucus (because no evidence exists), and saliently, these documents had been readily available to any person who expressed interest in investing in Blue Sky!

So comically flawed was Sowerby's action that 12 of the 13 defendants filed strike-out applications (while the other won't participate in the case at all). The Australian Securities and Investments Commission was lucky enough to be the first heard.

At that hearing, Sowerby's bumbling barrister, Dr William Wild, put on a command performance. In one classic exchange, he relied upon as evidence a Chanticleer column which had asserted that Glaucus "keeps in close touch with ASIC."[[I don't wish to re-open old wounds, but of all the historical Chanticleer columns to rely upon, this one probably wasn't a great choice.]] Justice Bradley asked Wild, "Do you allege that as a fact, that Glaucus keeps in close touch, or are you just alleging that the newspaper said that?"