Post by @NewtonMark@eigenmagic.net

2026-05-11 22:05 UTC

@MattHatton@aus.social @camwilson@mastodon.social The way Australia comes up with some of the most hilarious obvious global-scale grifts never ceases to amaze me. Remember Lex Greensill? Byron Bay local. Absolutely inevitable from day one that he was a massive fraudster, but he convinced the likes of Telstra, Vodafone UK, Sanjeev Gupta, Deutchebank, and god knows who else to pump up his tyres to the tune of tens of billions of dollars before the collapse. Extraordinary stuff.

Replies (1)

@NewtonMark@eigenmagic.net 2026-05-11 23:45

@MattHatton@aus.social @camwilson@mastodon.social The Greensill story was very funny. Greensill did supply chain finance (which is legitimate and often useful). If you’re a business, you’ll have an accounts payable function which pays your suppliers. Might be hard to predict and manage, because different suppliers have different trading terms and different months will have different bills falling due. So you go to a supply chain finance supplier and they say, “Pay me a fixed monthly fee. Tell your suppliers to send their invoices to me, and I will use that fee to pay them. I’ll keep a bit of cream on top for my trouble, and you’ll get a nice predictable smoother manageable monthly bill to help your cashflow. Win win!” So that’s “The pledge.” But Greensill had “The twist.” 1/

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