Bret Silvey: ‘Elite sports culture’ blamed for brother of acclaimed author’s ‘overambitious’ $71m fraud

A man who fraudulently obtained millions from one of Perth’s biggest investment dynasties partly blamed “the unusual culture of elite sport” for his over-ambitious financial scheming. Bret Silvey — the brother of best-selling WA author Craig Silvey — pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud in February and faced a sentencing hearing in the District Court on Thursday. The court was told Silvey secured ever-increasing sums from Randal Humich and his father Ivan Humich. As the sole director of Cancun Trading, the 44-year-old borrowed the money for a fixed term, promising an agreed a rate of return. He then invested it in stock markets. Between 2018 and 2020, he convinced the Humiches to hand over $71 million, falsely claiming he was maintaining Allianz insurance policies covering his obligations under the agreements. He did that by emailing forged documents, purportedly from two solicitors at Sydney-based Turnbull Hill Lawyers. The masquerade involved a fake domain name he’d registered with a US-based domain registry dropping off a single letter — turbullhill.com.au — so the emails looked legitimate at a glance. Silvey also registered bank-guarantees@commonwealthsecurities — again to make his machinations appear legitimate. His intricate web of deception even included creating a fake email address appearing to belong to the Humich family. But a newspaper article about fraudulent bank guarantees raised the suspicions of Randal Humich, who discovered that the CommSec address was bogus and confronted Silvey — who claimed he’d been hacked. After the law firm said it did not act for Silvey, the Humich family took civil action, securing freezing orders over his assets. Within a week, Silvey had returned most of the money and filed for bankruptcy a short time later. Prosecutor Beau Sertorio said he still owed them $7.5 million and it wasn’t clear in the complicated case where that money went. Defence counsel Nicholas van Hattem said, however, that it was “lost in trades during the unusual circumstances of the pandemic”. Mr van Hattem said that was one of three “theories” his client had for what unfolded. The second was that he felt like a provider growing up in a household where he was the oldest son and his father had abandoned his mother. The third explanation was that he had enjoyed a career as a cricketer in Australia and the UK, and in elite sports culture, “If you have some talent, you push to the next level”. The State accepted Silvey did not intend to inflict economic loss on the Humich family, believing they all could benefit financially. But he did it at a scale “beyond his capacity and he lied”, Mr van Hattem said. The lawyer said there was no evidence his client splashed the cash on an extravagant lifestyle, and he was “deeply ashamed of his actions”. Judge Nicholas Egan said Silvey’s theories for his offending “smell of excuses” while Mr Sertorio said there was not much difference between “pure ambition” and being motivated by personal gain. The prosecutor described the offending as “incredibly serious” and persistent in its dishonesty. Silvey understood he faced a significant term of imprisonment, Mr van Hattem said. And being on bail while initially fighting the charges, he was remanded in custody ahead of sentencing on May 2.