• Rear Window
  • Updated Jan 30 2018 at 11:00 PM

Getswift's sketchy disclosure continues

GetSwift managing director Joel McDonald and executive chairman Bane Hunter.
GetSwift managing director Joel McDonald and executive chairman Bane Hunter. Christopher Pearce
Myriam Robin AFR Woodcut
by Myriam Robin

Shares in last-mile delivery service GetSwift were suspended last week by the ASX after an investigation by this paper found GetSwift failed to inform the market about losing significant contracts. And while this is trivial compared to what our colleagues discovered, here's another instance of sloppy disclosure the company's just-signed advisers PricewaterhouseCoopers can look into.  

On December 4, GetSwift added ICT exec Nevash Pillay to its tiny and heavily invested board. This was the last investors heard of her. Though it shouldn't have been. 

According to the ASX listing rules, a company must lodge a 3X, or initial notice of director's interest statement, no more than five business days after the appointment of a director, which given Pillay's appointment would have been December 11. But there isn't one listed on the ASX website, nor on the company's website (which just links back to the ASX for market releases). On December 11, the company, under the advice of its spinners M+C Capital Partners, did issue a statement about an over-subscribed institutional placement. We've read it closely and it says nothing at all about Pillay's holdings. A further six releases were issued that month, but none can count, even generously, as a statement of Pillay's initial interests. Nor was a statement issued in the early part of January. The absence of a 3X statement was not one of the areas of concerns of a recent ASX query to the company. 

The lack of a 3X isn't the only thing that sticks out about Pillay's appointment. According to the release, she's "a member of the Telstra executive team". Which is rather generous way to describe Pillay, who isn't exactly in the C-suite. She's the director of Telstra's Global Indirect Channels division, a role in which she leads a team of 250 people. Last year, Telstra employed 32,000. Pillay understandably not listed on Telstra's website as one of its key executives, but she has been profiled in Vogue.

Pillay replaced the company's previous CIO Jamila Gordon, whose resignation was announced on November 20. There was no exiting director's interest notice, or 3Z, relating to Gordon either.