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Mickey the 'monster': Sinister allegations behind spectacular corporate unravelling
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- [00:05]
A
Mickey Ahuja catapulted his company, Massachusetts Services Group, from nothing to the big time to become the security provider of choice to the federal government, retail giants like Coles and Bunnings and a major sponsor of AFL clubs. But his empire was a house of cards. I'm Matt Dunkley filling in for Samantha Salinger Morris and you're listening to the Morning edition from the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Today, Nick McKenzie on one of the more spectacular and in some ways disturbing corporate unravelings in recent memory. It's Monday, March 9th. Alright, Nick, to start, obviously you've been reporting on MA Group for a long time along with Cam Houston and it's come a long way from there where now we're looking at things like massive breaches of labour and tax laws, there are allegations of sexual crimes against the founder. But before we get to that, I think we would love to hear from you a bit about what does the company do, what is it that this organisation is offering?
- [01:13]
B
I guarantee you every person listening to this podcast will have walked past an MA Services security guard or cleaner outside A Coles, a Kmart, a Bunnings. The guards from MA Services were at Moonbank. They were at universities in Sydney, grammar schools in Victoria. They worked for the Federal government, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, Massachusetts. Security guards were in short, everywhere. One of the biggest security companies in Australia, one of the fastest growing and as our investigation has revealed now, one of the most corrupt.
- [01:46]
A
Where the story started was in a public sense anyway, was on their links between bikies and government contracts. What did you find? What let the fuse on this story? And why did that matter?
- [01:57]
B
I mean, the start of the story is a bit nuts, which I think for me really highlights just how crazy the whole MA scandal is. So how did it start? We find out that the Finks of Bikie Gang, so an outlaw motorcycle gang is somehow through a subcontract providing security guards in a big offshore security deal ultimately funded by the Albanese government. How the hell are bikies doing this? Turns out the company that won that security deal was in fact, despite all these layers of corporate obfuscation, was in fact MA Services run by Mickey Ahuja. So unpacking that MA Services, big security player in the private security industry, uses its contacts to convince the Nauru government to hire it to secure provide security for Australian immigration services on Nauru, funded by the Albanese government. And then MA Services to carry out this task works with a company controlled by none other than the global head of the finx. Outlaw motorcycle gang, a fearsome criminal called Ali Bilal. What that gave us an insight into is, well, MA Services on the surface looks like this incredibly professional rising star of the business world, Mickey Ahuja, was Entrepreneur of the Year. I think on a couple of occasions he was rubbing shoulders with corporate titans. He was sponsoring AFL clubs. He struck a deal to have the MA Services logo plastered on the jumper of the Melbourne Football Club, the Demons this very season. They would be running out this week with MA services plastered on their on their jumper. But beneath that glistening facade was a company that actually operated allegedly with a vast amount of criminality. So not just working with bikie linked companies, but exploiting its workers, not paying them properly. Mostly foreign workers. These are thousands of security guards who were routinely ripped off, underpaid the award, not paid superannuation or very little, not paid annual leave or overtime. The reason why MA was booming as a security company, the reason why Coles, Kmart Bunnings was lining up to do business with MA Services was because they were cheaper. Now, of course, the more we pull at that thread, the more we find out about the CEO. He's not just ripping off his own workers. He's not just living the high life. He's not just not paying his taxes to the tunes of tens of millions of dollars. He's also harassing, bullying and most seriously, allegedly raping female employees.
- [04:33]
A
And that's where this weekend's reporting really kicked in. But I would like to just come back, bring you back to the reporting through the second half of last year, because you did manage to lay out quite a few of those things and, and start to really pull that company at its edges until it went down just before Christmas. What was the response, do you think, from government and from its corporate clients and those kinds of people who were paying the bills here, who had lifted this company up. How did they respond when you started doing that reporting?
- [05:05]
B
Initially, I think the response was probably behind the scenes panic and then very careful corporate and government spinning. So almost to a person, those companies said. And the government agencies, the Federal Department of Parliamentary Services, there was the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, there was even the National Anti Corruption Commission. We had Coles, Kmart, Bunnings, Amazon, afl, AFL clubs, the list goes on. He was a hoojier in MA Services, supplying security to the Melbourne cup, the Spring Carnival. He'd run the contract to secure this weekend's Formula one Grand Prix. And on it goes. So all these companies react with panic and initially saying, we, of course, as you would expect them to Say, support the lawful treatment of workers, the proper payment of tax, and we want our subcontractors, be it MA or anybody else, to not be breaking the law and exploiting workers. That was the holding position of most of the customers. Then we start asking the question, well, how is it, if we can figure it out, that you can't? Now, Coles, with all its many billions of resources, somehow could not figure out what in some respects was glaringly obvious. It was an open secret in the private security industry that Mickey, yahooja and MA Services was involved in the systemic exploitation of workers. It was known that he ran a network of companies linked to what looked like very suspect phoenixing, which is potentially criminal behaviour. These are companies that are collapsing as soon as their tax or worker debts arise and they re emerge as a fresher entity. This sort of stuff was pretty well known in the private security industry. We found it out. Why didn't Coles? And really, why didn't the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, which was also paying MA Services big bucks to secure its premises?
- [06:59]
A
So let's talk about Mickey's response when you started laying out all these allegations, started going to all of his big customers, started making these very damaging claims and reporting out some of the details they clearly would not like to be public about the involvement of bikies and all this other stuff. What was his response to us?
- [07:16]
B
I might start with his most recent response through his spokesperson. He's fled the coopies in Dubai. He's offshore. I've put fresh questions to him and the response yesterday was, may you fear God. Now, I'm not quite sure what that means, but his general tactic has been deny, dismiss, delay. You know, the great tactic of any corporate spinner working for a crook, Mickey Ahuja. We've caught him lying a number of times. So, for instance, he really tried to deny he was involved in this deal with the finx outlaw bikie gang to supply security guards paid for by ultimately the Aussie taxpayer offshore. Then we find the paperwork which lays bare his lies and so suddenly he pivots and tries a new lie. He's denied and attacked, sometimes behind the scenes, those women who've been brave enough to call him out for sexual harassment or even alleged rape. So another PR tactic then, which is to go on the attack at all times. He's been spinning, obfuscating and hoping he could sit this one out. Laid last year, as the revelations continued to mount, he stood aside as the CEO of MA Services, a tactic clearly designed to hope the scanner would move on. And we'd lose interest. Of course, that did not happen because it's not just the investigative team of the Age and City Morning Herald in 60 Minutes on his case. It's the Tax Office, it's the Labour Hire Authority, it's potentially other agencies. In fact, we've revealed that a multi agency operation, Operation Hermes, is now hot on the tail of Mickey Yahooja. Now, ultimately, his company was placed into administration at the end of last year. Christmas Eve, the company effectively collapses overnight. 1,700 workers are out of work, many of them loyal MA security guards, many of them underpaid, many of them still to this day owed many thousands of dollars in superannuation and pay.
- [09:13]
A
Can we talk about those workers for a second? Because you have spoken to a lot of them and in many ways this story boils down to his treatment of them and mistreatment of them. What do they tell you about what it was like to work for ma?
- [09:27]
B
Well, as Mickey was betting in the high roller room of Crown Casino, sometimes with chips worth $100,000 each, as he was flying around the world, flying first class, as he was driving his many luxury vehicles, including a Lamborghini, these workers, his workers, were sometimes barely struggling to survive, living below the poverty line. They were getting paid, by a regulator's estimation, at $10 below the award on a standard day. That would be up to $60 below the award on, say, a Sunday or a public holiday. They weren't paid. Superannuation. A worker I met, a tremendously brave Pakistani, had told me it was embarrassing for him to talk to his kids because he didn't know whether he could put food on their table. These are Australians providing a critical service. Yes, of course, they're migrant workers, but they're Australian migrant workers providing a critical service, keeping us all safe outside a coal store when we go to a major sporting event, when we go to the Melbourne cup, when we attend our university. And to put it bluntly, they were being treated like not just second class citizens, they were being treated like dirt. Now, who was pocketing the money that should have gone into their pockets? Of course, it was those that are part of what's now known by law enforcement as the MA syndicate. Mickey Ahuja and his other lieutenants, they were getting filthy rich while some of the poorest, the most vulnerable workers in this country were struggling to make it day by day
- [11:00]
A
after the break.
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B
At the heart of this mega scandal is many brave women who were bullied, who was sexually harassed by Mickey Ahuja. And it was the bravery of these women which, more than any other aspect of this scandal, blew this scandal up.
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C
Jack Harndale was helping his daughter Emily lift an awkward dresser up a staircase when he slipped and fell backwards. A week later, Emily asked him how he was doing.
- [11:34]
B
I'm good.
- [11:35]
C
Truth was, he wasn't good. Jack needed help. Then the darndest thing happened. Emily called Pacific Source my health plan. Jack learned that Pacific Source provides members with support beyond healthcare. In Jack's case, we got him in touch with the local food bank.
- [11:51]
B
You guys do that?
- [11:52]
C
Yes, we do, Jack. Pacific Source Health Plan.
- [11:55]
A
One of the best parts of the investigation on the weekend was a very rare interview with the Labor Hire Authority boss who said that the situation you've just described as the conditions that those workers were working in at some of our biggest events and companies. He gave very short shrift to the idea that the companies who were doing the paying didn't know. Didn't he?
- [12:18]
B
It's an extraordinary intervention by Steve Dargavel. He is the labor hire licensing commissioner and he heads a regulator in Victoria, the Labour Hire Authority. Basically, he's responsible for making sure that any business that supplies workers to major infrastructure projects, to supermarkets, security workers, cleaners, agriculture workers out on fruit farms, whatever it might be, that those workers aren't subjected to exploitation, especially mass exploitation. He's there at its height to stop human slavery. He very rarely speaks out. In fact, I don't know any television interviews or major newspaper interviews he's ever done, but he went public for us. And why? It's his contention not only that MA Services has utterly and systematically and disgracefully rorted many thousands of Australian workers, but that its major clients, or some of them led by Coles, but including Kmart and Bunnings, that these companies must have known about this rort. Now, what Dar Gavel says is that the contracts that, say, Cole signed with ma when you do the maths on those contracts, when you look at what was being paid for those security guards, it had to be that those guards were getting paid under the award. Steve Dargable's agency has estimated or calculated that underpayment at least $10 under the award. That's a huge rort. When you think about the number of the many thousands of guards that were working for MA at coal stores across a long period of time. These are contracts worth $50 million a year in revenue to MA. So at the heart of the scandal is not just the underpayment of many of our most vulnerable workers in Australia. It's the connivance of Coles and to put it in Steve Dargavel's words, he says corporates like Coles, the way they handled these contracts, they have the morals of an alley cat.
- [14:09]
A
What did you make of Coles response? It seemed to me that they were just arguing that they had asked the question that the company had come back and said, no, no, we're paying the right rate, we're doing the right thing. And that seemed to be good enough for Coles. What do you think of that?
- [14:24]
B
Coles has vociferously denied that it knew that this large scale rorting was going on. It's now turned its attack onto MA Services, saying it was duped. MA are the crooks. Its scheme, in Coles's words, was misleading and sophisticated. That is the scheme by which it underpaid its security guards at Coles's stores. And Coles did not have the ability to find that out. That does not really pass the stress test. If we as journalists can find it out and we're not actually employing these guards, how earth could Coles not have? Let me give you one example. A basic ASIC search, a corporate search very easily done, of Mickey Ahuja, the supplier of these guards to Coles, would have revealed that, for instance, in 2013 he started a company which he directed for a number of years to supply sex workers escorts across Melbourne. Its name, Sin City Escorts. A red flag that maybe Mickey Ahuja wasn't the corporate partner that Coles would wish to do business with. There are many other red flags. There were many court cases easily accessible publicly where MA Services guards had been ripped off, not properly paid, or judges or tribunals made very stern or damning comments about MA Services operations. There were regulator findings that were posted online raising very grave concerns about MA Services and its conduct. There was the general knowledge in the private security industry that MA Services had grown so quickly because it was rorting, exploiting some of the lowest paid workers in the country. And then of course, the devil's in the detail. In these contracts that Coles and other corporates were signing with MA in those contracts, it should have been clear, according to those in officialdom, the regulators that have looked at these contracts, it should have been clear that there was a RORT going on. Added to that, other corporates had sacked MA Services from their companies years ago because they said it was obvious that MA Services was up to no good. MA Services had been named openly in state parliament as a potentially crooked company. So how could Coles not have known?
- [16:27]
A
If I could turn now to the very troubling thread in the story, I think, which is more about Mickey Yehuda's treatment of women, senior women who worked for him. It's very tough watching the interviews with those very brave women. Could you talk to me a bit about how that thread of the story came into being and what that's been like, just trying to report it.
- [16:51]
B
I think the reason this story is so significant, it is not just a story about mass worker exploitation on a stunning scale. It's not just a story about corporate greed, not that which extends beyond MA to allegedly to big corporates like coleslaw. It's not just a story about tax evasion and government agencies not doing their due diligence. It's not just a story about how bad our private security industry is in Australia because MA is just one of a number of companies doing the wrong thing. It's also a me too story because at the heart of this mega scandal is many brave women who were bullied, who was sexually harassed by Mickey Ahuja. And it was the bravery of these women which, more than any other aspect of this scandal, blew this scandal up. When one of the first victims came forward to me and revealed how Mickey Ahuja had demanded sex for money in a very sexually harassing and frankly disgusting manner. How that had made her feel like a piece of meat. His demands that she slept with him in return for money, which he did not do. But when she had the bravery to reveal those approaches, those repeated approaches by him publicly, suddenly the corporate world, the government agencies that were working with MA services, could no longer delay their response. And many of them almost immediately began to cut ties to sack MA services. But now we know many more stories from women, including one very brave woman who's gone public with the age. The Sydney morning Herald in 60 Minutes. We're calling her Sara. She worked at MA on camera. And her description of confronting, not only this, the just awful treatment of workers by ma, some of those workers she was ferrying around milk and nappies to, these are poor security guards who are getting utterly ripped off. But her own treatment at the hands of Mickey Ahuja, her experience of suffering, allegedly, in her words, a rape, being assaulted awfully by Mickey Ahuja. And it must be said, she is not alone. And there are other allegations that are really graphic and really terrible, involving other cases, perhaps not of rape, but certainly of egregious sexual misconduct or sexual harassment that have also been passed to us, which we are now investigating. But it's those brave women that broke. I think this Scandal truly open. And it's those brave women who should be utterly commended.
- [19:18]
A
What do you think happens next for them? What do they want out of this process, out of talking to us, out of telling their story, which I can't fathom how difficult that was. But what do they want to come out of this?
- [19:32]
B
Like all the victims of MA services, of the MA syndicate of Mecca Ahuja, be they victims of alleged rape, victims of alleged sexual harassment, be they many of the thousands of guards that were underpaid or not paid, superannuation, not given sick leave or annual leave as required under the law, like all these victims, they want justice. And what is that? That's accountability. That is Mickey Ahuja facing the music now. He scurried off to Dubai as his company was collapsing. There is an administrator hot on his tail. It's traced many millions of dollars into his personal accounts or those of related party companies. So there is a process there, but that only goes so far. We do know that law enforcement operation Hermes is also pursuing Mickey Ahuja. But ultimately, I think justice looks like Mickey Ahuja in one way or another, actually facing his accusers through some sort of process of accountability, facing the music and allowing them properly to have their day, allowing those workers who've been ripped off to be repaid, and allowing those victims, if they want to pursue Mickey Yahuja through the civil or criminal justice systems, if they want to sue him, whatever it may be, allowing they to have their moment of justice and to help them bring a very awful chapter in their lives to some sort of close.
- [20:53]
A
It's an incredible story when you think back over all of the things that you've just told us about, about where it started with bikies, with Nauru, with massive corporates, with huge underpayment, with the company collapsing now with this pretty terrible allegations against the founder. When you look back over all that, where do you think this fits? Where does MA sit and why does its conduct matter so much? What should this say to Australians and our policymakers?
- [21:22]
B
This is a really tremendous and awful reminder ultimately for governments, but for private industry, for the corporate world, for all our listeners, and for the general public that we still have in Australia, a system of corporate oversight that doesn't really work, that corporate greed trumps all else, that you can still get away many years after major scandals, major underpayment scandals, that you can still get away with underpaying thousands of very vulnerable migrant workers in this country with almost relative impunity
- [21:56]
A
and in plain sight, right? Like he's not like he was a low profile guy. His Instagram is full of Ostentation. He's sitting there in a Collingwood team photo. He's putting himself right out there in the public eye. Wasn't trying to fly low at all.
- [22:10]
B
That's right. You can do the wrong thing as a corporate player, a big corporate player like MA Services. The rest of the corporate world will turn a blind eye. Law enforcement, our regulators, there are some terrific characters out there doing their best. The labour high authority of Victoria is certainly one of them. But largely across the board, regulators, law enforcement, act too slowly, if at all. Money trumps all. Corporate power is what matters. And you do the wrong thing, you'll get away with it. That seems to be unfortunately, the moral of this story. But we wait and we watch. Maybe Mickey Ahuja will move from a case study in impunity to a case study in accountability. And I think that's what all these victims are hoping for.
- [22:55]
A
I certainly hope that's right. Thanks very much for joining us, Nick.
- [22:59]
B
Great to be with you.
- [23:11]
A
Today's episode was produced by Josh Towers. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. And our podcasts are overseen by Lisa Muxworthy and Tom McKendrick. If you like our show, follow the Morning Edition and leave a review for us on Apple or or Spotify. Thanks for listening.