Former Venture Egg adviser permanently banned

A financial adviser who allowed others to provide Statements of Advice (SOAs) in his name and was actively involved in the dodgy referral processes that led to significant client losses due to the Shield and First Guardian collapses is now banned.

Aristotle Papapavlou is permanently banned from any involvement in the financial services and credit industries.

Papapavlou was authorised by Interprac Financial Planning as of September 2021 and worked for Venture Egg from October 2021 to July 2023. After leaving Venture Egg, he went on to be authorised by Hejaz Financial Advisers up until February this year.

Prior, Papapavlou was licensed through Dover Financial Advisers until its closure in July 2018, prompted by its extensive misconduct being publicised by the Royal Commission. He was then authorised under Consilium Advice, a group established by former Dover advisers.

In banning him, ASIC said Papapavlou lacked competence, adequate training and judgement as a financial adviser, and engaged in dishonest, misleading and unprofessional conduct.

The regulator said Papapavlou was actively involved in Venture Egg's high volume advice process, in which third party referrers undertook the client fact finds, and was complicit in a process in which he knew other advisers were signing his name, and the names of others, on their SOAs. The SOAs were then presented to clients Papapavlou and the other advisers had never even met.

Typically, this process resulted in the client being told to roll their super over into Shield and First Guardian.

Often, the SOAs were presented by the third-party referrers, and Papapavlou was aware of this and allowed it to happen as he was receiving remuneration for each client that was rolled into the now collapsed schemes, ASIC said.

The banning in relation to credit activities is the result of Papapavlou completing an assignment for and falsifying a reference for another person, ASIC added.