Court showdown to hear details of Perth philanthropist Michael Dunjey’s alleged unlawful investment scheme

To South Perth’s Wesley College — motto ‘by daring and by doing’ — its old boy Michael Dunjey was a model of faith in action. This Perth philanthropist was profoundly influenced by spending a key part of his childhood with his Baptist missionary father in Pakistan at the base of the Himalayas where he developed a passion for mountaineering. He spent character-building years conquering many of the region’s major peaks before a long-planned attempt to become the first West Australian to climb Mt Everest ended when he almost lost his fingers to frostbite less than a day’s climbing from the summit. Turning his energies back home to business and charity, the name Mr Dunjey chose for his enterprises was a nod to his climbing past and life philosophy — Ascent. And as The Wesleyan magazine noted, he pursued good works with zeal, the publication telling the elite 99-year-old college’s former students and backers in 2019 that Mr Dunjey’s Ascent Foundation was partnering with “change-making organisations and local leaders to transform the lives of the poor and the vulnerable in developing countries worldwide”. “His approach to philanthropy has been influenced by his belief that everyone is called to do something good and his passion lies in supporting people to live this through example,” The Wesleyan said of the 1990 graduate who studied engineering before working as a podiatrist. Drawing on his mountaineering experience, Mr Dunjey became a motivational speaker, encouraging people to take steps towards “larger than life goals”. He also became a life coach whose clients included Wesley, the West Coast Eagles, BHP, Rio Tinto and the Riverview Church. And finally he was an investment guru who borrowed money from potentially more than 200 investors with promised interest rates of 15 per cent on loans that his supporters say were used to fund his sophisticated money-making activities. Mr Dunjey told investors that he used his profits from his trading to helped him to launch and fund the good works of his Ascent Foundation. These activities included bankrolling a day care centre in Bangalore, helping groups fighting child trafficking in India and Thailand, and a clothing factory in Kolkata’s red light district. “Just as the Israelites created a new legacy for the generations that followed, we aimed to enable lifetimes of positive impact to flow from the wealth we create for our investors,” he wrote in one pitch to potential investors. That pitch was among more than 500 pages of evidence that Australia’s financial services watchdog filed in the Federal Court in December last year to gain injunctions stopping Mr Dunjey leaving Australia and freezing his assets and those of his main money spinning company Ascent Investment and Coaching. The case is back in the Federal Court this week as the Australian Securities and Investments Commission tries to seize control of an alleged $140 million investment scheme regulators suspect was run by Mr Dunjey’s company. Before things started crashing down in December last year, Mr Dunjey’s life had all the trappings of success including full or joint ownership of 18 Perth properties, as well as a 2016 Ferrari and 2020 Jeep Wrangler in the garage of his Applecross home. But ASIC alleges his business was not all it seemed, its lawyer and investigator Jamie Macchiusi telling the court in December insufficient funds were being invested to generate the guaranteed returns Mr Dunjey promised investors. Rather than being invested in his purportedly world-class trading systems, he said, new deposits were suspected of being used to pay guaranteed returns to existing investors. ASIC revealed in the court that it was being helped by a former Dunjey supporter who put $1.2 million into what she now believed was a Ponzi scheme. There appeared to have been no shortage of willing investors in Ascent Investment and Coaching’s trading strategies. Mr Dunjey’s spotless reputation and network helped him attract funds from business, social, school and church connections over the past decade promising and delivering those high interest rate returns. Clients included members of the vibrant Riverview, whose Burswood church is around the corner from Mr Dunjey’s office. Churches are renowned by regulators in Australia and internationally as one among the most lucrative places for investment promoters to lure potential backers. Regardless of whether the investment is good or dubious, the job of a promoter can be be made all the easier in the affinity, faith and good will that prevails within a church’s walls. One Riverview member said Mr Dunjey had recently assured them that he had “all this money offshore but everything is sweet”. “We all feel sorry for him,” the member said. Mr Dunjey has kept a relatively low profile since sending out a statement in December last year saying material released by ASIC from was “quite misleading in some material particulars”. And he pointed out the investigation as outlined by Mr Macchiusi was “at a relatively early stage”. “I am deeply troubled by the enormous anxiety and fear that is being generated by the actions and claims of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in relation to my company,” he said. “I have been trading successfully for decades and can stand by an international reputation that can be testified to by financial organisations globally. “ But rather than Mr Dunjey’s trading system proving highly profitable for Ascent Investment and Coaching, ASIC lawyer Jonathon Moore claimed on May 31 that the company had just $2m of assets. And with $140m of debts, Mr Moore claimed Ascent had “absolutely no hope of ever paying” its investors. ASIC has been pushing ahead this year with its investigation and with an application for the winding-up of what it claimed was an unregistered managed investment scheme allegedly being operated by Ascent Investment. This part of the case gets bogged down in some deep legal technicalities and strong disagreements between the regulator and Mr Dunjey’s supporters about whether what he was doing contravened Australia’s strict laws around managed investments. Managed investments involve the pooling of members’ money in pursuit of a common benefit. Backed by a comprehensive loan agreement, his supporters argue Mr Dunjey borrowed money from individual people and then used that money to finance his international investment activities involving company shares, options and investment funds traded on stock exchanges. Using his engineering training and risk-mitigation skills, Mr Dunjey claimed to have found a way to protect against market falls while making the most of investment market surges — generating average annual investment returns upwards of 40 per cent over a decade. This, in theory, gave him plenty of profits to pay high rates on investor loans and to also fund his charitable works. While the legalities and details of Mr Dunjey’s operations are to be hammered out this week, it is unquestionable that his business and charity empire has seriously declined since ASIC went public with its probe in December. While hotly contesting many of the claims made by ASIC about his investment and funding structures, Mr Dunjey agreed with the regulator last month that a team of insolvency accountants from Deloitte should take charge of Ascent Investment. Mr Dunjey’s investment flagship is in now in provisional liquidation, a mechanism used by courts to protect and hunt assets at troubled companies. With Justice Michael Feutrill having given it full access to documents collected by ASIC during its investigation, the Deloitte team will potentially report back to the court ahead of June 29 showdown between Mr Dunjey and ASIC. Meanwhile the Ascent Foundation has taken down its website, with co-founder Sera McCulloch having resigned from the registered charity’s board in January this year. Along with Mr Dunjey, Ms McCulloch had been a face of the foundation. She showed Wesley junior school students photographs of children in Bangalore they would be supporting through an arrangement facilitated by Ascent Foundation, the Wesley College board told the Uniting Church synod in 2017. Mr Dunjey and Ms McCulloch also attended an assembly to collect gifts and letters from the children of Perth to their friends in India. “There has been a direct intent to move towards educating the children about philanthropy and how we can make a difference in the lives of others,” the synod was told. Pointing to service forming a “central tenet of the human element of fulfilling the mission of God”, the board noted the work of Old Wesleyan Mr Dunjey and the charitable foundation he “began after living in India and wishing to help the people around him”. In that Wesleyan magazine issue in the 2019 summer, Mr Dunjey told of his belief in the universal call to do good. “I believe the biggest gift I’ve been given is empathy — everything I do is from a place of empathy,” he said. Wesley College last week declined to discuss its high praise of its old boy and ASIC’s Federal Court action against him, saying it had a policy of not discussing matters before the court. But it did issue a statement outlining its arrangement to help Ascent Foundation fund Saleena and Immanuel Johnson at a daycare centre in a extremely poor part of Bangalore. Along with more than a dozen photographs, Wesley community relations director Mary Henry sent a comprehensive list of items sent and received through this relationship, including a desktop computer, an iPad, books and storage equipment to establish a library, sporting equipment, plus rice and food supplies during COVID-19. “Due diligence is an essential part of our process when giving to any charitable organisations and our relationship with Johnson Daycare was no exception,” Ms Henry said. “This included requesting copies of annual reports, meeting with the representatives and use of donated monies and goods.” Wesley’s funding arrangement through Ascent Foundation ended in 2020. Mr Dunjey said in December that he considered “ASIC’s concerns are misguided and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of our business model”. ASIC’s legal action has been fought all along on Mr Dunjey’s behalf by veteran Perth lawyer Bruce Dodd, who was the regulator’s regional commissioner from 2008 to 2013. Mr Dodd is also an elder at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Bull Creek and a longstanding leader at Trinity Theological College in Leederville. Mr Dodd said he had money from his self-managed superannuation fund with Mr Dunjey and Ascent since 2014 and they had not missed a beat until ASIC launched its legal action in December. “Guess what happened — the train crashed,” he said. The West Australian contacted Mr Dunjey’s representatives for this story but the invitation to comment was politely declined.