The Australian, the widest circulating national newspaper in Australia, suggested that a technology company located there and its managing director, Adam Troy Adams, were linked to a Ponzi scheme. Now, the News Corp.-owned newspaper has published an apology to both Adams and his company, Global Road Technologies.
The April 19 apology states that “The Australian did not intend to give the impression that Mr Adams or GRT were involved in the Pearls Ponzi Scam.” The allegations were made in March 2016, the apology stated.
“The Australian apologises to Mr Adams for any harm and embarrassment those articles may have caused,” the apology continued.
The apology was mysterious in that it didn’t state how many articles were affected, how the reporting went wrong or if any changes were made to existing articles.
iMediaEthics searched, via Google, The Australian‘s website for stories about Adams and discovered that the three links we found now lead to error pages. The stories were, according to Google, originally published from February 24 to March 15, 2016.
iMediaEthics has written to both The Australian and Global Road Technologies to ask what prompted the apology, if any legal action was ongoing, and what was inaccurate in the reporting.
According to Google caches of the articles which iMediaEthics viewed, the articles reported Adams and his company Global Road Technologies were linked to the Pearls Group Ponzi scandal. That scam involved 50 million Indian investors losing a total of $10 billion, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp. The investors thought they were investing in agricultural land, according to the Times of India.
The Feb. 24 article was headlined, “Pearls Group Ponzi scandal linked to Peter Foster scam.”
“A Queensland company run by the man who managed a weight-loss scam for career criminal Peter Foster has emerged as a partner of India’s Pearls Group, which is being pursued for allegedly running a $10 billion Ponzi scheme,” the now-deleted article stated.
“Adam Troy Adams, the subject of a major legal case by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission over his role as general manager of Foster’s $6.4 million SensaSlim fraud, now runs a company called Global Road Technologies,” the article went on.
The article added that Adams’ attorney denied any link between Adams and his company with the Pearls Group, and that 110 investors lost more $6.4 million from the company Adams formerly worked for, SensaSlim Australia.
The other two articles that have been deleted repeat the allegations about Adams and his company.