Multiplex Extortion !!!

[nikko]

Seems like bullshit...but still scary stuff.

Police probe Multiplex extortion bid
THE AGE
February 28, 2005 - 7:14PM


Australia's largest construction company, Multiplex, was the target of an extortion bid, police said.

A police spokeswoman said detectives were investigating a plot to extort millions of dollars from the construction giant, which built Sydney's Olympic stadium and is redeveloping Wembley Stadium in London.

Channel Nine reported the extortion bid included a threat that snipers would begin shooting Multiplex crane drivers if the company did not hand over millions of dollars within 24 hours.

The police spokeswoman would not disclose the exact nature of the threat or the amount demanded, but said detectives were taking it seriously.

"The threat against Multiplex is considered serious and officers are working closely with the company, staff and relevant unions to resolve the situation," she said.

"Detectives from the State Crime Command's robbery and serious crime squad are conducting this investigation."

The spokeswoman could not comment on how the threat was delivered to Multiplex or precisely when it was received.


She also could not confirm a reported link between the extortion bid and the Russian mafia

[Gertzy]

Nothing has happened so It was probably a Hoax to get $50m in the bag. But if it was true, theres a whole list of Aussie Targets like:

*Riparian Plaza, Brisbane
*SkyPlaza, Canberra
*Freshwater Place buildings, Melbourne Southbank
*One on the GC I think
*A couple in Sydney
and some in perth but not sure.

[sakor1]

Originally Posted by NEWS.com.au

'Da Vinci Code' threats
By Joe Hildebrand
March 04, 2005
From:

Multiplex threat / clips
Cracked ... the code here was cracked by The Daily Telegraph

AN extortionist who threatened to kill building workers unless a $50 million ransom was received from construction giant Multiplex used a 400-year-old code to communicate with the company.
The Vigenere Code - made famous recently by best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code - was invented in 1586 and not broken until 1860.

The Daily Telegraph yesterday cracked a version of the code the blackmailer used in his threats to the company.

The extortionist has been communicating with Multiplex via newspaper ads.

It appears the extortionist, who threatened to kill crane drivers unless he was paid the ransom by Tuesday, made the company use the code to communicate with him.

The Daily Telegraph yesterday deciphered the message, which appeared as a public notice in The Weekend Australian on February 19.
Advertisement:

In its encrypted form it read: "SVGUCSK BFPTAT NSKWEUM DS MZ YXTQA - LV@JXPLBGZCJ.VTS"

It could only be deciphered with the key word to translate the message.

The key, clearly developed by the extortionist, was an alphabetic loop which read: "DESTROYMULTIPLEXDESTROYMULTIPLEXDESTROYMULT"

When translated, the message is revealed as a bid by Multiplex to have the extortionist contact them via e-mail.

It reads: "PROBLEM PLEASE CONTACT ME ON EMAIL AR@MULTIPLEX.BIZ"

The vicious nature of the keyword again reinforces the belief in the industry that the extortionist is no cool criminal but an aggrieved sub-contractor out for revenge.

Sources had told The Daily Telegraph that the threat to have crane drivers shot by a sniper if the money was not paid by Tuesday was designed to cause chaos on construction sites.

Not only are cranes the backbone of big developments, if a crane operator is taken out the load could fall on other workers or passers-by, creating fear.

The Daily Telegraph revealed yesterday the extortionist had also written to the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union urging them to warn their members of the danger, in an apparent bid to shut down sites.

That note read something like: "Multiplex are bastards. They've been ripping off sub-contractors too long. They haven't paid compensation.

"Therefore you better go and tell the workers - because one of them is going to get killed."

In Victoria and Perth more than 1000 workers walked off the job, but NSW workers braved the threat. Interstate workers have since returned to work.

Police are still investigating the matter and are refusing to comment on progress, as is Multiplex.

But there is speculation the threat may be an elaborate hoax.

No Multiplex worker has been harmed since the deadline passed.

It was suggested the strife arose from its troubled $1 billion-plus Wembley Stadium development. Multiplex said it had secured a $1.6 billion bank debt facility, expected to reduce costs.

Heh, full on.

Stu

[below-0]

Below is an example of going too far with aggressive business tactics. Nobody said the construction industry would be easy nor uncompetitive.

Originally Posted by smh.com.au - Multiplex faces the music

By Kate Askew and Carolyn Cummins March 5, 2005

It was vintage John Roberts - the ebullient, knockabout building contractor from Perth hurling profanities across a London office at prominent Saudi businessman Sheik Abdullah al-Rushaid in early January last year.

The founder of the 43-year-old construction giant Multiplex - a racehorse breeder and "four-on-the-floor" speedster in the excessive 1980s - was facing a big hiccup in Multiplex's much-vaunted expansion into Britain. It was an expansion that had been used to sell the $1.2 billion public float of his company a few months earlier.

Sheik al-Rushaid was faced with the excitable Roberts - a figure a union official once said "wasn't known for his dress sense", let alone his diction - because he had the misfortune to be principal shareholder of the subcontractor with which Multiplex was in dispute.

And disputes with subcontractors are something Multiplex knows plenty about.

Five weeks ago, an individual whom police now suspect was connected with a disgruntled subcontractor mailed an extortion letter to Multiplex's Kent Street offices in Sydney. The demand was for $50 million - or heads would roll, literally. On Tuesday, the extortionist threatened to use snipers to shoot crane drivers on Multiplex sites. The threat has not been acted upon.

Multiplex is no stranger to litigation, which is commonplace in the construction industry. The list of legal cases relating to construction and development disputes is extensive and over the past decade has included the subcontractors Abigroup, Riteway Constructions, Australasian Concrete Services and Rapid Contracting.

Back in January last year, the subcontractor in Roberts's firing line was Cleveland Bridge, the bridge-building arm of Sheik al-Rushaid's steel manufacturing and engineering firm, Cleveland Group.

A war was being waged over the reconstruction of the prestigious Wembley Stadium - a contract Multiplex had won in a climate of suspicion, resulting in the British Parliament commissioning a special report into the process. With the debacle of the Millennium Dome fresh in the public's mind, the British press had begun casting Wembley as the next disaster.

The problems with Wembley - Roberts's prize contract - barely raised a whisper in Australia.

Back then, Multiplex, which had taken the British construction market by storm, was still operating as a private company. When Multiplex's prospectus came out in late 2003, it contained a sparse half-sentence reference to Wembley and made no mention of the design and project risks.

But by the end of last week, Wembley was a dirty word.

It was Wembley and its problems that were largely responsible for the near 20 per cent rout in Multiplex's securities price after it announced a shock $68.3 million write-down and said future legal claims totalling $111 million would have to be resolved in its favour to get it to a break-even position.

In the eyes of many in the sharemarket, it was just another version of Multiplex's hard-to-shake habit of opacity.

What isn't widely known is that Multiplex's original joint-venture partner, Bovis Lend Lease, had pulled out of the race for Wembley because it believed the risks on the technically complex job were too great, with the design parameters not complete, and the financial rewards too slim.

Multiplex stayed, agreed to split the design risk with the client, and won the contract.

But from the outset, it has been fraught.

Wembley prompted the company's chief executive, Roberts's son Andrew , to muse in quieter moments this week that every company has a problem project.

"The way the Wembley project was managed was extraordinary," said construction consultant David Hudson, chairman of the firm that prepared the internal report on the awarding of the Wembley project for the English Football Association, in an interview with London's Mail on Sunday newspaper in May 2002. "It clearly wasn't managed in a professional way. The normal procedures of checks and balances were never implemented."

Of course, a bit of parliamentary intrigue would be nothing to John Roberts, who is no stranger to public inquiries.

He received an honourable mention in the royal commission on WA Inc for being the fourth-largest donor to the Labor Party, behind notables such as Alan Bond, Lang Hancock and Laurie Connell - along with other donors such as Dallas Dempster and Warren Anderson. Noted by the commission was the "extraordinary" size of political donations made by him and others.

More recently it was the Cole royal commission on the building industry.

Although there were no adverse findings against it, Multiplex and other contractors were found to have made illegal strike payments to unions.

Perhaps John Roberts's hard line can be attributed to the fact that he knows failure.

In the mid-1950s, Roberts set up RP Constructions. After building Broken Hill High School and other public works, the company found its work drying up. So it moved to Adelaide.

RP Constructions went into liquidation in the late 1950s owing about £56,000, and the liquidator docked the principals' salaries for 18 months.

Roberts told Herald journalist Kate McClymont in the 1990s, in his first newspaper interview, that he "felt terrible" about the failure.

All of which contributed to public scepticism about the Roberts family's ability to run a company in a public forum when they floated their very private, extremely successful business in December 2003.

Back then, Andrew, Roberts's eldest son, did the talking.

He had been elevated to the position of chief executive, and the family banked on the smooth-talking polo player becoming the acceptable public face of the group.

For more than two years, he had the market convinced.

Meanwhile, the patriarch was in London, ensconced in Grosvenor House Hotel in ritzy Mayfair, doing what he does best - winning contracts left, right and centre.

Still the question remained: would the Roberts family, with its bare-knuckle way of doing business in a notoriously secretive industry, be able to take the company public and continue to manage market expectations?

The answer from any institutional investor or stockmarket analyst on Thursday last week would have been no.

In the investors' eyes, Multiplex had misled them - an accusation that Multiplex vehemently denies.

"The market has been bamboozled and the group has been aggressive in some of their assertions," an analyst who attended a meeting with the company told the Herald.

Back on November 23 last year, on a drab London day, Multiplex had driven about 30 analysts from their upmarket inner London digs to the Wembley site.

The impression left by Multiplex, says one analyst on the tour, was that the British operations were the "engine for future growth for the group".

"The directors were pressed about Cleveland Bridge and any problems, but they said the group was within its right to dismiss Cleveland and bring in Hollandia and they were confident that the outstanding claims would be successful," the analyst says.

So convincing were Multiplex executives Andrew Roberts, John Corcoran and Noel Henderson that investors were happy to buy the stock at $5.54 in a $200 million placement in late December. Multiplex securities jumped to $6.50.

It was hardly surprising, then, that investors were horrified when the problems at Wembley were revealed at the interim results release on Thursday last week. Multiplex securities plunged, with investors all but ignoring the fact that the company confirmed it expected to meet its forecast profit, indicating just how much sentiment had been damaged.

"This situation is clearly not a good one for the listed property trust sector" was all Resolution Capital's managing director, Andrew Parsons, could say to the Herald.

He had been far more vocal with the company, criticising Multiplex directors during the results briefing for not informing investors earlier about the Wembley problems.

In a highly unusual move early on Monday, the Roberts family pledged to put up $50 million of its own funds to shore up any potential losses from Wembley.

Coincidentally, the same day Channel Nine led its afternoon news bulletin with an extortion threat against Multiplex for precisely the same amount - a story that appeared to be the result of a leak from Scotland Yard.

Some gave the family credit for the funding gesture, and the Multiplex share price recovered some of its losses.

Others viewed it only as a further blurring of the line between public and private.

Wembley's problems had begun to filter through to the British press by the middle of last year.

Multiplex didn't respond publicly until August, when it announced that Wembley was expected to come in ahead of time and within budget.

In fact, the dispute with Cleveland Bridge was well advanced and had already headed into a series of arbitrations.

Cleveland Bridge had been brought in to forge the steel pieces of an eye-catching 133-metre arch and then raise it above the stadium.

Multiplex now admits there were problems with the design and that Cleveland had some genuine issues.

As the steel specialist tried to get it right, repeatedly sending the design back to Multiplex, its relationship with the Australian company broke down almost completely.

So in January last year, Sheik al-Rushaid and John Roberts had a series of meetings in London in a last-ditch effort to get the arch at the landmark stadium raised.

After fraught negotiations, a supplemental agreement was drawn up under which Multiplex was to make staged payments to Cleveland. Within days of the arch going up, Multiplex declined to make the final payment and put Cleveland on notice that it was keeping the outstanding funds as damages.

Cleveland was astounded by what it saw as a slight to its show of good faith. Its view was that Multiplex had played along in order to get the arch in place but had been working up a legal claim behind its back.

Multiplex agrees that Cleveland was surprised.

In the end, Cleveland was vindicated. The matter went to arbitration and it won on every count. The arbitrator said Cleveland had completed the work and ordered Multiplex to make the final payment.

The arbitrator would not rule on the issue of damages, and the pair return to the Court of Technology and Construction in the UK early next year.

Institutional investors interviewed by the Herald this week say that Andrew Roberts blamed lack of communication between the company's Wembley management team and its head office.

"Roberts said, 'We just didn't know at the top level what was happening at the project level; it wasn't being communicated to the top level,"' says a fund manager who was briefed by Roberts. "The message from the directors is that the group has had an explosive growth rate over the past 18 months and it's caught up with them.

"Andrew Roberts said one of the problems has been the lack of human resources and that senior management were not aware of the extent of the problems on the site."

Andrew Roberts has moved to London to tackle the problems.

Deputy managing director and Multiplex stalwart Ross McDiven has also been dispatched to Britain, leaving hard-to-please investors wondering if the company's local operations are adequately covered.

"There was a feeling at the end of his [Andrew Roberts's] presentation that he was sincerely shocked and naive about the level of disclosure the listed property trust market demanded," says another fund manager who attended a meeting with Multiplex this week.

"They have clear remorse but admit that they are prepared to do anything to make good."

It was Multiplex's decision to bank on winning £45 million ($111 million) from legal claims at Wembley - revealed in a note buried in its accounts - that again had investors concerned about Multiplex's aggressive accounting stance.

The Wembley problems also led to robust negotiations with its auditor, KPMG, over the evidence surrounding its accounting treatment of the stadium contract. Multiplex had conducted a review of the project in late January, after Andrew Roberts moved to London.

KPMG followed that up with its own review, hiring independent experts to assist.

Neither did Multiplex disclose in its accounts £19 million in contingency funds which it had put aside for Wembley.

"We don't have to disclose it in our accounts," a defensive Corcoran said on Wednesday night. Instead, the contingency funds were disclosed in an investor presentation by Multiplex.

If Corcoran's comments are any indication, Multiplex, even as a public company, continues to weigh up the pros and cons of sharemarket transparency.

Back in 2001, Multiplex became involved in a development in Pyrmont, Multiplex Bauhaus, with a former employee, Ian Widdup, and the controversial businessman Jim Byrnes. In the 1980s, Byrnes was jailed for the deemed supply of heroin. He has fought numerous bankruptcy battles and was discharged from bankruptcy in 1995.

Multiplex and Byrnes and Widdup became embroiled in a dispute in 2002, which eventually led to Multiplex transferring its shares in the development company to Byrnes and Widdup.

There was a further dispute when Multiplex demanded the removal of its name from the company's title.

In a letter to Multiplex, Byrnes said: "Regarding your letter of the 9th instant, these veiled threats mean nothing to me. There is an old saying: Those who come to court, come with clean hands.

"Should you wish to commence any proceedings, go right ahead. In fact, I invite you - indeed I dare you - to commence proceedings. For then and only then will you see that you have kicked the lid completely off Pandora's box.

"I hope the managing director and the previous directors of Multiplex Bauhaus Pty Ltd and the shareholders all have plenty of spare time. In fact, some of them may need a couple of years.

"I wonder what value will be placed on the name Multiplex after directors have been dragged through the mud, tarred, feathered and held out to be liars, cheats and parties not fit to hold the role of directors."

Justice Arthur Emmett of the Federal Court found that Multiplex was justified in commencing legal proceedings against Byrnes and Widdup - particularly given the "unequivocal attitude" of the letter.

Byrnes and Widdup agreed to remove Multiplex's name and were ordered to pay Multiplex's costs.

It's not the only colourful incident the company has had with partners and contractors.

North Shore accountant David Hicks was a consultant for Multiplex. Last year, severed kangaroo heads were found in the hull of Hicks's catamaran at Woolloomooloo Wharf. It was thought the incident related to a disgruntled subcontractor. Hicks wouldn't comment at the time.

Multiplex says it knows nothing of the incident. Police do not appear to have been contacted at the time of the incident.

Multiplex now has the job of fulfilling the past week's promises to investors - that is, that Wembley will be on time and within budget. It has extended the completion date for Wembley, from January 30, 2006, to late February - in time for the FA Cup final - after negotiations with the Football Association.

Ironically, Hollandia, the firm that replaced Cleveland Bridge, has brought in another Cleveland Group subsidiary, Dorman Long Technology, to give it technical assistance.

One institutional shareholder, who holds Multiplex securities, sums it up: "The problem is, the market doesn't know what tomorrow brings. They're an unknown quantity."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/Business/...700679681.html

[Drunkill]

Said in the MX today, that the people demanding the money were using a code to give messages to multiplex, the Davinci code...yes, the code leonado made, and took 400 years to break, and well its now in a book, and soon to be a film, but the poeople who are demanding stuff are using the same form of code to diliver messages.

[Gertzy]

I take It nobody has heard the new set of Threats, same thing but deadline has been extended to April 18, must be serious If its a second threat, but they're still saying Its some angry Contractor or Something.

[Drunkill]

Yeah i read about it last night again. No stopping work this time though, last time all multiplex sites in Melbourne stopped.

if i were the CEO i'd be scared heh, knowing that a crane driver might be shot...while working, for all you know he might be lifting some steel girder, and if he is shot leans on the lever to drop it...

[Gertzy]

Yeah, I know but this time Its sounding pretty serious, If its happening a second time. But It could be someone trying to get $50m from a company but if it didn't work the first time he'll do it a second time, but it could be Someone trying to also get $50m from a company but at the same time will make the company pay for not paying or something as in i.e shot the crane drivers.