The tech billionaire, the beautician and the backlash

The Age

5 days ago

Sitting up the front of the plane, an Oregon beautician took a selfie while on the 17-hour flight across the North Pacific Ocean to Hong Kong to rendezvous with an Australian billionaire.
'He better be worth it,' Kimberlee Cvitash wrote in a since-deleted Instagram post from May this year.
The billionaire in question was Richard White, 70, a musician and former guitar repairer who founded global logistics software giant WiseTech in 1994.
In the past year, White's complicated personal life, including multiple relationships with women, including WiseTech employees, has resulted in board upheaval following a number of complaints about inappropriate conduct, a number of which have been settled.
Engineer Greg Williams, who met White decades ago while both were members of the Church of Scientology, and before they became band members, observed that the billionaire was 'insecure on his own' and, in recent years, he witnessed White requesting an employee, whom he named, to spend the night with him.
Cvitash, whom White flew to Hong Kong to be with him in May, posted a not-so-subtle photo during their stay. The photo of a shopfront read: 'Billionaire Boys Club' – the luxury streetwear brand founded by American rapper Pharrell Williams. White is Australia's 15th-richest person, with a $10.6 billion fortune.
'Happy Freedom Day from Australia … I love my Bexley guitar player,' Cvitash posted during a visit to White's Bexley compound in July last year.
An investigation by The Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age can reveal that the controversial businessman is supporting Cvitash, who runs Skin Wise Academy in Portland. The beautician receives a sizable monthly allowance and has told friends that White picked up the $30,000 tab for her breast augmentation surgery and face work.
White is also paying the $11,000 monthly rental for Cvitash's four-bedroom lakeside property on the outskirts of Portland.
In February 2024, Cvitash posted a photo of 'my new little home' with the hashtag #welllovedwoman and the flags of Australia and the US linked by a love heart.
White's multitude of property dealings for his paramours have resulted in a flurry of unwelcome publicity over the past year, and a slew of confidential settlements, which have been uncovered as part of ongoing investigations into allegations of inappropriate conduct, intimidation and bullying – all of which have been denied by White.
In October last year, wellness entrepreneur Linda Rogan claimed White expected her to have sex with him in exchange for an investment in her business. The claims were made as part of a legal stoush in which Rogan sued White over a $92,000 furniture bill. Rogan claimed she was stuck with the bill after White's now-wife Zena Nasser, a former criminal lawyer, discovered the affair and kicked her rival out of the $13.1 million Vaucluse house White had secretly purchased for Rogan in September 2022.
White, Nasser and Cvitash did not respond to questions.
At the same time Nasser was brutally ending one of White's property deals, she was embroiling him in a new one with her ex-husband.
Questionable loans
Mark Merhi, who left Australia in mid-2022 with $80 million in corporate debts owed by his companies, recommended White finance three property developments in western Sydney, including one he'd sold to an associate on the cheap before his business collapsed.
After a joint investigation by the Financial Review, the Herald and The Age revealed the existence of White's $70 million loan to Ahmad Ahmad, a nut roaster from Lakemba, the WiseTech founder publicly claimed he was calling in the loans and would move to sell the three sites if the money wasn't forthcoming.
Five months later, the loans remain outstanding and White is down $70 million, plus interest. There has been no indication White has moved to take control of the properties and sell them. Meanwhile, his company RealWise Finance remains the lender to the developments, according to property records.
Documents obtained during the joint investigation show that for more than a year, White had not bothered to formalise the loan agreement.
White began lending money to Ahmad's companies in November 2022, starting with $5 million, followed by $3 million in May 2023. A formal loan agreement was finally drawn up in August 2023, which drastically increased White's loans to Ahmad's companies to $53 million. By March 2024, the loan increased to $70 million.
Ahmad's companies bought one property – a former Aldi supermarket which had been owned by a Merhi company – for $13.5 million in September 2020. This was $5.5 million less than Merhi's company paid for it five years earlier. Helm Advisory liquidator Stephen Hathway told creditors the sale may have been an uncommercial transaction as the site 'had potential sale value of $23,300,000', in an October 2022 report.
Privately, White's friends and associates have expressed dismay over his involvement with Merhi, who had a colourful history before moving to Dubai.
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Merhi and his brother, Khalil, who were involved in various companies within the Merhi Group, were central figures in an inquest into four deliberately lit fires, all using stolen cars loaded with accelerants, which were crashed into the properties.
Simon Turner, who was the compliance and safety manager for the group of companies run by Mark and Khalil, told the joint investigation that his bosses orchestrated the four firebombings between 2006 and 2010. Two of the fires were at a neighbouring property the Merhis had been trying to buy, he said.
'They drove a car through the security gates and the roller door and set it alight,' Turner said of the two fires at the Merhis' neighbouring premises in Seville Street, Fairfield. 'It was exactly the same as what happened at the CFMEU and Bellevue Hill.'
Turner said the Merhis were at war with the construction union when they firebombed the CFMEU's Lidcombe office. The fourth fire was in Bellevue Hill.
Turner recalls receiving a call from Khalil Merhi about the Bellevue Hill development site, where the Merhis were in dispute with the owner. 'That prick owes us money … get all the gear out of the office,' Khalil is alleged to have said.
Turner said the original plan was to crash a 100-tonne crane onto the site but it was then decided to use a car loaded with accelerant.
The fires were linked to organisations or people who'd had 'confrontations or disagreements with Khalil Merhi and/or Mark Merhi,' Coroner Michael Barnes found in 2016.
On May 12, 2010, the day before the Lidcombe firebombing, Mark Merhi had a tense discussion with a CFMEU executive about his company's alleged breaches of employment and taxation laws. Later that day, in a phone call, Khalil threatened to 'take the union down', the coroner noted.
A petrol-contaminated glove found at the CFMEU fire contained DNA which was matched to brothers Jalal and Emad Alameddine. According to the coroner's report, each of the four cars used in the firebombings had been stolen from the Punchbowl area. 'Both men have committed offences of car stealing and the vehicles used in each of the fires were stolen from an area close to where the two men lived,' the coroner found.
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But, ultimately, there was not enough evidence to make a conclusive finding and no charges were laid.
Land title records show that on Christmas Eve 2009, nine months after the second firebombing of the Seville Street premises, the owner gave in and sold to the Merhis. The transfer was witnessed by the Merhis' solicitor Zena Nasser, who had married Mark Merhi in October 2009.
Once they'd bought it, the Merhis used it as their headquarters. Turner, who worked there, said Nasser had an office on the top floor and a parade of bikies Nasser was legally representing would troop up the stairs to see her.
Earlier that year, The Daily Telegraph described Nasser, 29 at the time, as a 'Rolex-wearing Gucci shoe-clad daughter of a Lebanese developer' who represented a number of prominent bikie gang members.
'Her clients include members of the Notorious bikie gang and Kings Cross nightclub entrepreneur John Ibrahim and his brothers Michael and Sam, former head of the Nomads gang and now believed to be a key player behind Notorious,' the Telegraph reported.
Nasser has previously distanced herself from her former husband, saying she was in a relationship with Merhi for less than 18 months 'and they went their separate ways in 2011, the same year their daughter was born'.
She said she 'has been the sole carer and a single mother' since then.
However, an entity owned by her former husband, Merhis Living, donated $700 to Nasser during a charity bike ride when she was working at major consulting firm EY in 2018.
That same year, Merhi's company became a shareholder in a short-lived lingerie business, Alexa Intimates, founded by Nasser.
Property records also reflect the dealings Nasser had with her former husband. Nasser bought two properties from his companies in 2014 and 2017.
She acquired an apartment in Rickard Street, Bankstown, in 2017 from Rickard Apartments – a company Merhi founded – for $550,000. Nasser later sold this apartment at a $95,000 loss to former champion bodybuilder and convicted steroid dealer Sidique Tarawally in 2022. Merhi had also sold an apartment in a different building to Tarawally two years earlier.
Police raided Tarawally's home in Bankstown, in Sydney's south-west, in March 2024. He was convicted but given a two-year community correction order this year, avoiding jail.
There is no suggestion Nasser or White were aware of any of the illegal activities of Tarawally or Mark Chikarovski, who purchased the Vaucluse mansion, which was also sold at a substantial loss.
Using a front company, White bought the Dalley Avenue house for $13.1 million in September 2022, watching the online auction under a pseudonym, Rick LeBlanc. However, just three weeks after Rogan collected the keys, White's now-wife Nasser discovered the relationship and kicked Rogan out of the home. Five months later, it was sold at a $1.6 million loss to Chikarovski, who was later convicted of running a lucrative drug business on the dark web under the username AusCokeKing.
It turns out that wasn't the first house White had bought for a friend or lover and made a loss on. White bought a four-bedroom waterside house in the southern Sydney suburb of Oatley for another WiseTech employee he was in a relationship with for $1.8 million in 2018. Two years later, White sold the property for a $75,000 loss.
In 2022, White forked out $1.6 million for a four-bedroom house in Narara, near Gosford on the NSW Central Coast. He offloaded it in May this year at a $500,000 loss. His mate Greg Williams, a fellow former Scientologist who was working for White, had been renting the place until the pair fell out in mid-2023.
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Williams has theorised that White began using the name 'Wise' in his companies as a way of 'giving the middle finger' to the Scientology organisation they'd both once belonged to. The World Institute of Scientology Enterprises (WISE) was established by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard with the expectation that members would utilise WISE's principles in their own business organisations.
Williams said he and White had fallen out over the Narara lease agreement and the purchase of a CB radio because of the lack of phone reception at White's holiday home at Sentry Rock. Williams had been supervising work at the luxury estate on the Hawkesbury River purchased by White for $12 million in 2020.
'I could crush you,' were White's parting words to him, Williams recalled. Witnessing the conversation at White's Bexley compound was another former Scientologist, Reg Kennedy, White's driver and gofer. Kennedy has frequently featured as a director for companies White has used in his property purchases.
Kennedy resides in one of the six townhouses within the billionaire's Bexley compound.
After returning to Oregon after a visit to White in July 2024, she posted a video showing a view from one of the townhouses. 'I miss the birds in Bexley and him,' Cvitash said.