Investors who were deceived by Melissa Caddick before she went missing and passed away are set to recover a part of their $23 million in losses. This comes after reaching a settlement in a class-action lawsuit with her auditors.
Victims have already been repaid $7.25 million after liquidators of the dead fraudster sold off her assets in 2023 and 2024.
In September 2023, the 32 investors initiated a class action to claim compensation from the five auditing firms responsible for examining Caddick’s accounts from 2012 to 2020.
Caddick, aged 49, disappeared in November 2020 following a raid by ASIC agents on her lavish residence in Sydney’s prosperous eastern suburbs. The raid was part of an investigation into her Ponzi scheme.
Caddick engaged in “a sham or facade” using her company Maliver to transfer investor funds, Justice Markovic found in November 2021 in a separate Federal Court lawsuit brought by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
Maliver was used to conceal that victims’ funds were spent on Caddick’s lavish lifestyle instead of being used to buy shares for their self-managed superannuation funds, the judge said.
Coroner Elizabeth Ryan in May 2023 ruled Caddick was dead, but she was unable to determine the cause because most of her body had not been found.
The fraudster’s badly decomposed right foot, which was still attached to a running shoe, washed up on a beach on the south coast of NSW in February 2021.
Caddick’s husband Anthony Koletti was the last person to see her alive and declared her missing.
He withheld information relating to his wife’s disappearance and could not be ruled out from being involved, the coroner found.
