‘I’ve waited 10 years for the truth’: The billionaire, the French president and the satellite that crashed to Earth

A decade ago, Singapore property mogul Ching Chiat Kwong made a promise to himself – one day he would return to Australia and seek justice in the courts for the investors who were burnt in the collapse of satellite company NewSat.

That day has now arrived.

In April, the Supreme Court of Victoria will hear a $US5 billion ($7.06 billion) claim for damages by the liquidators for NewSat on behalf of creditors against the financiers and other backers of what promised to be the first Australian-made and owned satellite – the Jabiru-1.

“I am very determined to actually find out what happened,” Ching – now with a net worth touching $1 billion – says in his first interview on the matter with the Australian media.

“I’ve waited more than 10 years for the truth to come out.”

Liquidators from WLP Restructuring bought the case in 2020 against some of the biggest lenders and project facilitators in the world. This includes the ultra-powerful US agency the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) and French state-owned credit backer Coface, then overseen by French President Emmanuel Macron.

The liquidators to NewSat are also suing the international banks involved in the project, including Société Générale and Credit Suisse, whose assets were acquired by UBS.

It is expected to be one of the biggest cases to be heard before the Victorian Supreme Court. Ching – a former director of NewSat who owned shares in the company and provided short-term loans to keep it afloat – has provided $20 million to fund the lawsuit. He estimates his losses from NewSat have topped $110 million.

NewSat collapsed in 2015 – without ever launching its satellite and wiping out $200 million of investor money – after this masthead revealed a raft of governance issues.

Those problems included the conduct of its flamboyant chief executive, Adrian Ballintine, who in 2020 pleaded guilty to creating a false or misleading document relating to the transfer of money from NewSat to his private yacht-building business.

It also famously included a stoush among the group’s directors during a board meeting, which at one point nearly descended into fisticuffs – an incident caught on video and published by this masthead.

NewSat was responsible for a project to launch Australia’s first satellite, long before Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites were able to offer telecommunication services in remote areas. It had contracts in place worth about $850 million.

Under the planned rollout of the Jabiru satellite, Lockheed Martin would construct the satellite and would be funded by EXIM bank. France’s Coface had agreed to support the launch of the satellite by local company Arianespace, while several banks provided funding.

The project was never completed after finance was pulled, and its Jabriu-1 satellite was junked.

The case brought by liquidators to NewSat alleges the project’s backers and its lenders moved too quickly and acted unfairly in response to concerns about the group’s governance.

Ching, who was on the board of NewSat at the time, says the company was not given time to properly assess the allegations or to act in response to them.

“There were some views about the CEO and the corporate governance of the company. That’s why a forensic consultant was hired [by EXIM] to do an investigation into all the allegations,” Ching says.

“You are innocent until proven guilty. So we were waiting for this report.”

Then a director, Ching did not attend the 2014 board meeting in which then-chairman Richard Green accosted fellow director Brendan Fleiter after Fleiter had asked why NewSat was paying a success fee to Green’s son-in-law as part of a rescue package involving Ching.

Approached by Green, Fleiter exclaimed: “What are you going to do? Stand up and hit me?”

“Well I might, yes,” Green, who died in 2025, shot back.

Despite the heat in NewSat’s board meetings, Ching says the company soon accepted his $10 million cash injection, though he says receivers were called in by NewSat’s lenders days later.

The liquidators also allege financiers acted unconscionably by putting in new requirements on the company that were impossible to meet and withdrew their support without having a proper commercial basis.

“It doesn’t make sense for any lenders to stop the launch,” says Ching, noting that had Jabriu-1 been sent into the sky, NewSat would have been able to pay back its lenders.

“But to my shock, somehow this irrational decision came about, and there’s a reason, and these reasons will be established in court.”

Coface is vigorously defending the matter and has argued in its defence that its actions were driven by governance concerns. Its lawyers declined to comment.

EXIM and the bank respondents in the case, which are also vigorously defending the matter, were contacted for comment.

The liquidators’ case against the financiers is set for a six-week trial starting in early April. It is expected to include dozens of witnesses.

One of the potential witnesses is Macron, though it is thought that the chances of a video link appearance by the French president is unlikely.

Over the course of the past four years, Ching has learnt more about the events and decisions that led up to the decision by the financiers to pull their support for the project.

Just as Macron once said, “I don’t think – I know”, Ching is confident the case will shed new light on the machinations behind the French entity’s withdrawal of support.

“We actually know the reason, and this all will be highlighted in the court case, and that is really a pleasure for me,” says Ching.

“This is one legacy that I want to leave – that I fought for, my friends, my partners, shareholders, all the shareholders in Australia, so that they actually know what went wrong.”

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