Melbourne barrister or Sydney business tycoon? Unmasking the real David Stewart

David Stewart is not a name widely known to Australia’s business community despite owning one of the country’s largest spray paint companies and amassing an industrial property empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Until this week, Stewart lived a relatively anonymous life. Behind a high fence in Neutral Bay near Sydney Harbour, he has no doorbell, no public front-door access and no mobile phone.

But among a select group of commercial real estate agents on Sydney’s northern beaches, he is renowned for his Bentley, a seemingly insatiable appetite for cigars, and the dozens of warehouses he purchased from Warriewood to Frenchs Forest.

Little do they know, David Stewart was not always David Stewart. His former company, MMP Industrial, is now at the centre of a high-stakes Supreme Court case after its $42 million sale to a former Transfield executive in 2022.

Unlike David Stewart, Oshri Schwarz is a well-documented name on Melbourne’s court records as both a barrister and a defendant. Among those who remember him, all talk about his ostentatious tastes and penchant for cigars.

Corporate records, not a plume of cigar smoke, reveal Stewart and Schwarz are the same man.

From 1992 until 2001, Schwarz’s surname was slowly expunged from a slew of company records. Those who knew Schwarz by that name when he lived in Melbourne have never forgotten him.

“He was a buffoon,” said semi-retired lawyer Paul Connor, for whom Stewart was an articled clerk after he graduated from law.

“He tried to take over the office from day one. He’d smoke these huge cigars and puff himself up to his full height to make these ridiculous pronouncements about the way things should be run, and pontificate about the world as if he was some sort of colossus.

“He was like a cartoon character. From day one, it was a foregone conclusion that by [the end] of that one-year placement, he would be gone.”

Peter Chadwick KC, who graduated from law alongside Stewart from Monash University and was a member of the same readers group, also recalls Stewart’s tendency for flamboyance.

“He was a bit of a peacock, really,” said Chadwick. “Oshri would hold his own in the world as a hail fellow well met. He likes to give a good impression but there was nothing behind it.”

Within a few years of being admitted as a barrister in 1981, Schwarz’s name disappeared from the Victorian Bar Roll.

Others from that time say Oshri later called himself Richard Schwarz. His cousin, Iris Lustig-Moar, daughter of the late prominent property developer Ted Lustig, remembers him as “a strange man”.

Brother Marc Schwarz is disappointed to hear he is still alive.

“David Stewart is an arsehole,” he said. “May he drop dead.”

The brothers have not been in touch since the 1980s. “I’d rather be in touch with a bowl of Ebola,” he said.

Marc Schwarz said the brothers fell out over what he claims was Stewart’s move to rip off their mother.

“What kind of person rips off their mother? What does that tell you about the person?”

From Melbourne to Sydney

Long before Stewart’s name appeared before the NSW Supreme Court, Victorian Supreme Court records show that in the early 1980s, he purchased a matrimonial home in South Yarra with his wife, then called Helen Schwarz, with the help of $169,000 from his late mother, Hassia Schwarz.

When Stewart moved to Shepparton a few years later, he purchased a business there with another $125,000 from his mother.

Around this time, Stewart’s bank balance was further bolstered by $191,000 from Marc Schwarz. When the money wasn’t repaid, Marc Schwarz took action, launching legal proceedings on Christmas Eve 1986 seeking repayment of more than $200,000.

Stuart’s defence is not lodged on court records and the matter was dismissed before any hearing, leaving the results of the dispute unknown.

Six months later, their mother Hassia Schwarz launched her own suit against Stewart for a claim of outstanding debts.

According to Hassia’s affidavit lodged before the Victorian Supreme Court, Stewart had told her he would make an offer to settle the payment and if it wasn’t accepted, he had money overseas to drag on any action for more than three years.

Stewart denied making the threat in his affidavit at the time, claiming the money was a gift rather than a loan.

The dispute was discontinued before its slated hearing but relations between mother and son never recovered.

When Hassia died in 2012, her will claimed that Stewart’s outstanding debt was an asset owed to her estate.

“I make no provision for my son Oshri Schwarz because I have made substantial loans to him during my lifetime and he has neither paid interest nor repaid any part of them.”

By the late 1990s, Stewart’s business interests had expanded beyond hardware to include the car wrecking and used car parts business, as well as pet supplies and industrial property investments.

In 1999, he purchased a new home in The Rocks, and a year later took over Motor Mates Products. He later rebranded it MMP Industrial and transformed it into one of Australia’s spray paint giants.

The email trail

Just as Schwarz is remembered among his Melbourne family and associates for his colourful personality, Stewart maintained that style at MMP, according to a tranche of emails left on the MPP Industrial server after he sold the automotive paint and aerosol business in 2022.

“How many times have I told you to never tell the truth about important issues or about the business?” Stewart wrote to his sons Nathanael (Nat) and Bartholomew (Barney) Stewart in 2016.

In another email, he responds to his sons: “F*#@ the world: I only care about profit and money.”

Stewart also expounded his views on “romance” to half a dozen staff.

“I shall not pretend that sex does not cost me money: of course it does: it always costs something,” he wrote. “However, I am proud of my achievements and when some slut tries to extract say $60 from me I always, without fail, negotiate the price down … This is the way a real man or a true romantic conducts himself.”

In a group email to staff and a property manager, Stewart referred to a real estate agent as a “whore” and picked apart her “abysmal” grammar.

In another email, Stewart described his business style.

“Over 20 years I made over $16 million selling second-hand car parts about which I knew no more on my last day than I did on the first. Over a slightly longer period I made double that amount selling crap to pet owners. And with all my mistakes, I have used idiots and buffoons to manufacture chemical products while I am incapable of making little more than a cup of coffee,” Stewart wrote.

“With the result that we are now sitting on assets of about $200 million.”

Stewart’s opinion of this masthead was also logged on MMP company emails.

“Only communists, anti-Semites and p—ters buy the SMH,” he emailed his son, Barney. “Which one are you, or do you fall into more than one category?”

Stewart and his lawyers declined to comment.

Despite Stewart’s at times abusive language towards his children (“I don’t like my own sons, why should I like yours,” he said in one email to a former girlfriend), Nat and Barney have benefited commercially from their father’s ruthlessness. Both were co-directors of MMP Industrial and remain co-directors with their father of about a dozen corporate entities.

In early 2021 and 2022, Nat and Barney each purchased a large family home in Turramurra for $5.4 million and $5.65 million, around the corner from their mother Helen Stewart’s $2.75 million apartment. Like their father’s sandstone cottage in Neutral Bay, there are no mortgages on title.

Schwarz becomes Stewart

The reasoning behind the family’s change of name remains unknown but the source of Stewart’s inspiration dates to the late 1980s, when his mother’s lawsuit was making its way through the court and he was living with his wife, Helen Schwarz, in Shepparton in Victoria’s north.

In 1986, Stewart, then known as Oshri, had a licence to sell hazardous substances from his Mitre 10 shop in Shepparton. Locals who knew him at the time say his closest associate for a time was a real estate agent called Ron Stewart and his wife, Ros Stewart.

Neither Ron nor Ros Stewart would comment for this story but corporate records show the couple transferred one of their corporate entities, Murlarm Pty Ltd, to the Schwarzs in 1989. By 1993, Stewart had taken their name as his own. Helen and their sons Nat and Barney also changed their surnames.

All four Stewarts were present at Nat’s sandstone church wedding at The Rocks in 2017.

Among Nat’s select guests was Brian Murphy, a long-time family friend and former manager at MMP who had also overseen Stewart’s car spare parts and wrecking business Datspares Toyaparts.

Daniel Lewinski has never forgotten the Datspares Toyaparts wrecking yard in Clayton on the outskirts of Melbourne. In the late 1990s, Lewinski was a 24-year-old delivery driver when he was directed up onto the factory roof to check something. In the process, he fell through a skylight onto the concrete floor below, smashing his left arm, breaking his wrist and shattering his pelvis.

Lewinski spent eight days in hospital, seven weeks in rehab, couldn’t walk for six months and has never been able to straighten his arm since. “I feel like I lost a decade to those injuries. It took me two years just to get back to work,” Lewinski said.

At the time, The Age reported Stewart’s company, Datspares Toyaparts, pleaded guilty to failing to provide a safe plant and system of work and was fined $20,000.

The company name was changed four months later. Murphy, the car yard’s then-manager, also pleaded guilty and was fined $5000.

Murphy went on to become one of Stewart’s most loyal long-time business associates.

In the decades since, Stewart’s wealth has soared. Among the Stewart family interests are nine property holding companies that collectively own dozens of industrial offices, buildings and factories across Brookvale, Frenchs Forest, Narrabeen and Warriewood, as well as the MMP Industrial factories in Mulgrave, north-west of Sydney.

Among the most recent acquisitions is the Frenchs Forest business park Equinox Centre, which was picked up in 2024 for $9.1 million, and another office complex a couple of doors away for $16.75 million last year. None of it is encumbered with the need for finance.

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