A Federal Court examination is shedding light on how the billion-dollar Public Hospitality Group collapsed
Aspiring pub baron Jon Adgemis once lived a gilt-plated life.
The former KPMG rainmaker (he made partner aged 28) cruised Sydney’s eastern suburbs in a black Maserati, entertained associates on a luxury Italian vintage yacht, arrived at the Melbourne Cup by helicopter, and paraded a series of glamorous Birkin-toting girlfriends at society events.
Then the good times came crashing down. The Australian Taxation Office began circling his debt-fuelled businesses, before eventually forcing them into bankruptcy last October owing $1.8 billion. This week, liquidators from BRI Ferrier spent days picking through the wreckage at a Federal Court examination, and the details weren’t pretty.
The yacht, Hiilani, has been sold to pay Adgemis’ debts. So have most of the cars. Model Cheyenne Tozzi, who split from Adgemis in 2017, has been asked to give evidence at the examination, which this week has finally shed some light on the billion-dollar mystery of how Adgemis’ Public Hospitality Group collapsed.
After leaving KPMG, Adgemis set his sights on building an entertainment empire to rival that of another perma-tanned eastern suburbs playboy, Merivale’s Justin Hemmes.
He made a bet on Australia’s post-pandemic appetite for pleasure, buying up 22 entertainment venues in Sydney and Melbourne. Crucially, he made the bet using others’ money, fuelling his purchases with cheap debt from investors wooed by unrealistic valuations.
The finer details of how Public Hospitality collapsed are particularly damning. In documents supplied to the court, the ATO said it was examining about $1 billion in spending incurred by one of Adgemis’ companies, alleging that it had received $77 million in GST refunds as part of a sham tax arrangement.
Alexander Andruska, a Woollahra councillor and a long-term Adgemis lieutenant said that those refunds were essential to running the business. He alleged that his former boss had used that money to fund his exorbitant lifestyle.
“It was very stressful. I wanted to bloody blow my brains out,” Andruska said of trying to manage Adgemis’ finances.
Accountant Sam Stringer, who was engaged by Adgemis after an audit by the ATO, told the court that the companies were not in a good financial position, and that trying to lodge their tax returns was a “mammoth” task.
“We were given very little information. They were extremely disorganised and impossible to get information from,” he said.
On Monday, Damien Hodgkinson, a co-founder of teal independent bank-roller Climate200 and an associate of Adgemis’ since their time as KPMG partners, was in court. The court heard that the pair had conspired to install Adgemis’ friend Marco Bettelli as sole director of Linchpin, a supposedly separate company that began operating some Public Hospitality Group venues amid financial troubles last year.
While several of Adgemis’ associates were grilled by the liquidator’s barrister Michael Rose, the man at the centre was conspicuously absent.
Adgemis spent just seconds in the witness box, before his lawyers moved a motion to have the matter set aside as an abuse of process and to have the liquidators’ solicitors, ERA Legal, barred from acting. If Adgemis’ examination proceeds, his lawyers want it conducted in secret, away from the prying eyes of the media, a move that is being challenged by news organisations including this masthead.
His sister, Despina Adgemis, took a similar approach, failing to appear on Thursday when scheduled. Her lawyers, Hamilton Locke, said she had never received a summons. Rose, counsel for the liquidators’, said that she had, whereupon her lawyers produced a medical certificate saying she was unable to attend.
Despina is married to Rodd Boland, another KPMG man whom Andruska alleged was made a “straw director” by Adgemis of several companies last year. Boland and Adgemis previously lived at a Rose Bay property owned by Jon and their mother Rose, which was seized by lenders last year.
While Adgemis’ family appears to be sticking by him, former friends are jumping ship. Andruska, who has worked with Adgemis since 2012, tried to downplay their friendship. “I do have a soft spot in my heart for Jon, but at the same time, he has caused me over a decade of stress, heartbreak and financial ruin,” Andruska told this masthead. “It’s a very toxic relationship.”
Over the years, many of Adgemis’ once lucrative friendships ended with lawyers at 10 paces. Bruce Gordon, the Bermuda-based nonagenarian billionaire WIN TV owner, was a former ally until he sued Adgemis over a $10 million loan. The pair settled out of court in 2021.
He was also close with Kathmandu founder Jan Cameron, until the relationship soured over unpaid loans. Adgemis would then turn star witness for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s prosecution against Cameron in a case after which she was fined $8000 after using a secret Caribbean tax haven to hide 14 million shares in baby food company Bellamy’s.
Adgemis was last year paying $61,000 a month to rent billionaire investor Will Vicars’ Bondi penthouse. But Vicars’ lawyers recently told The Australian it was “incorrect, misleading, and defamatory” to call the two friends.
Other former backers have, like his ex-girlfriend Tozzi, been asked to provide evidence to the liquidators’ examination. They include billionaire investor Alex Waislitz and private credit lender Ben Madsen of Archibald Capital.
Madsen is currently being sued in a bankruptcy judgment by HG Capital, which invests on behalf of wealthy Vietnamese Sydneysiders, over the millions lent to a collapsed company that he and Adgemis were directors of. Preliminary hearings in that matter, to which Adgemis is also a party, were also underway this week in the NSW Supreme Court, just downstairs from where the Adgemis examinations took place.
All that’s left now of Adgemis’ businesses is a mountain of debt, a conga-line of cranky creditors, and hefty legal bills.
Adgemis is understood to be footing his own legal bills, and is currently working as a consultant for a number of clients. He is represented by solicitor Jamie DiMeo and barrister Miles Condon, SC, who reportedly command fees of $15,000 a day. On Wednesday, high-profile criminal lawyer Bryan Wrench, who is busy acting for Alan Jones in his indecent assault trial and lobbyist Jeremy Greenwood, who is facing the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s probe into a Liberal Party sub-faction, made a cameo in court. Wrench and Adgemis have had a relationship for some time: the solicitor most recently represented the businessman during ASIC’s prosecution of Cameron in 2021, and more recently when he pleaded guilty to a low-range drink-driving charge in 2024.
And what of the pubs at the heart of his empire?
Most are being sold off or restructured. Some never opened, and those that did hardly set the dining scene alight. Controversial celebrity chef George Calombaris was made Public Hospitality Group’s culinary director, later joining Hodgkinson’s Linchpin, where he started serving up “Aussie, old-school, Chinese food” out of the Empire Hotel in Annandale. Good Food delivered Calombaris’ efforts at Double Happy a scathing 11.5 out of 20. “One night, there’s a cluster of dead flies floating in the soy sauce on our table,” national restaurant editor Callan Boys wrote.
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Kishor Napier-Raman is a senior business writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Previously he worked as a CBD columnist and reporter in the federal parliamentary press gallery.Connect via X or email.