ASIC’s Sarah Court on the Shield, First Guardian probe and the future of MIS oversight

2 responses to “ASIC’s Sarah Court on the Shield, First Guardian probe and the future of MIS oversight”

1. 

   Matt

   May 25, 2026

   Government departments are great at writing rule sets and legislation that they can’t hope to implement or enforce.
   Even when ASIC was led to the water and told of the illegalities they feel it somehow right to dismiss themselves of any act of competency and duty to the public they ultimately should be protecting.
   Scamming people out of their investment is as simple as declaring you are not an MIS and draining the accounts.
   ASIC will do nothing except
   protect the scammers with their own definitions and false proclamations.
   ‘Outside the regulated space as defined by our narrowed investigation clause. ‘
   Which isn’t actually a clause. It’s just what we say when we get found out we aren’t doing anything.

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2. 

   SONJA

   May 25, 2026

   ASIC says another $17.8 million for MIS oversight is “not a silver bullet”.

   Spare Australians the performance.

   Before demanding more taxpayer money, perhaps ASIC should first examine its own investigative methodology and internal oversight failures.

   For approximately four years ASIC investigated Lion Property Group. During that time:

   – misconduct reports were received;
   – investigations were opened;
   – investor funds were traced;
   – Information Memorandums were apparently reviewed;
   – and yet ASIC General Counsel Chris Savundra later admitted to Parliament that ASIC deliberately “narrowed” the investigation and treated Lion as being “outside the regulated space”.

   Except the Supreme Court later found Lion was operating an unlawful unregistered Managed Investment Scheme.

   So the obvious question is:

   How do you spend years investigating a property-investment structure and somehow bypass the most basic gateway regulatory checks under the Corporations Act itself?

   – MIS registration;
   – AFSL obligations;
   – pooled investor arrangements;
   – legality of ongoing fundraising.

   These are not advanced forensic theories.
   They are foundational compliance triggers.

   Meanwhile ASIC has aggressively pursued numerous smaller or comparable matters over the past two years involving unregistered MIS activity, property schemes and unlicensed fundraising.

   So Australians are entitled to ask:

   What exactly is the enforcement methodology here?

   Because from the outside, this increasingly looks less like a resourcing problem and more like a culture, prioritisation and governance problem.

   ASIC does not get to narrow investigations so far that it narrows away its own mandate — then return to the public purse demanding more money because it missed the obvious.

   Australians are not here to act as unpaid compliance officers or collateral damage for defective administration.

   And while regulators now lecture the public about stronger MIS oversight, victims are still fighting simply to access the CDDA process itself — the very administrative pathway publicly represented as the mechanism for addressing defective administration.
   That contradiction is becoming impossible to ignore.

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