Does Australia have a serious Corruption problem?

In 2021 Australia’s corporate regulator, ASIC, decided to destroy our startup AI company, Semantic Software, an unlisted public company with 200 small private-investor shareholders. In 2015, Semantic’s two US patent assets and sixteen patent applications had been valued at US$246 million by the world’s leading valuer of intellectual property. Since that valuation, the number of US patents issued to Semantic has increased eleven-fold to an extraordinary 22 US patents protecting very valuable AI technologies. Had the company proceeded with its plan to list in the US in 2022 without ASIC’s entirely unjustified interference, it now seems likely Semantic’s valuation as a world-leading AI developer would have risen to at least US$3 billion based on conservative valuation comparisons. As a result, Australia would have become a leading country for AI development and Australian taxpayers would have benefitted from hundreds of millions of dollars in capital gains taxes.

In 2021, ASIC secretly petitioned the Supreme Court of NSW to freeze Semantic’s assets, without notice of its intentions to the Directors, deceiving the Court with false allegations of serious director misconduct and targeted defamation of former directors. This direct approach to the Court followed two years of director harassment and apparently ignored ASIC internal guidelines for prosecutions that required threshold evidence of serious wrongdoing and referral to the Commonwealth DPP.