The Context
On 10 December 2025, the High Court appointed PwC as liquidators to six Chance Voight entities holding approximately $50 million in client deposits. The FMA triggered this, launching a formal investigation. The strategic trigger was an acquisition: in November 2025, a Chance Voight subsidiary bought Patterson Wealth Partners Limited, a licensed financial advice provider (FSP 347406). This is not a simple business failure. It is a weaponised acquisition, using a regulated entity as a shield for an unregulated fund with a history of regulatory defiance.
The Risk
The risk is not the liquidation; it is the contagion. When a firm with a documented history of misconduct—its principal, Bernard Whimp, has been in the regulator’s sights for over a decade—acquires a licensed provider, it imports that risk directly into a regulated environment. For a Director of the acquiring entity, this is a catastrophic failure of due diligence. Under the Companies Act 1993, your duty to act with reasonable care, diligence, and skill (s 137) is breached the moment you approve a deal that knowingly or recklessly exposes the company to regulatory destruction. The FMA will pursue the individuals who enabled this. Whimp’s own 15 December email to investors, denying insolvency, is a contemporaneous record of director-level representations that will be dissected for breaches of the Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013.
The Control
Your acquisition strategy is now a primary operational risk vector. The Chance Voight case proves that a tainted target can destroy the acquirer overnight through regulatory intervention, not market forces. Your due diligence must now explicitly model for regulatory reputation risk. It is no longer sufficient to check the books; you must forensicly audit the target’s principal’s history with every regulator, here and abroad.
When our firm last acquired a licensed entity, what was the specific, documented process for assessing the regulatory history and personal integrity of the vendor’s principals, beyond standard financial and legal checks?
Do our current acquisition protocols have a mandatory ‘regulatory contagion’ clause that can veto a deal based solely on the target leadership’s history of enforcement actions, regardless of the target’s apparent financial health?
If our firm were placed into interim liquidation tomorrow by a regulator’s application, what contemporaneous evidence (emails, board minutes, diligence reports) would exist to demonstrate I exercised due care in approving our most recent strategic acquisition?