Acquire Learning's 'big dogs' chased $1.2 billion a year — and left $147M debts

Founded in 2012 as an education broker after the Gillard government allowed HECS-style loans for diploma courses, Acquire Learning bought colleges drawing millions in student loans — often more than $30,000 per student — and ran a noisy Hawthorn call centre where pop music played loud while staff flogged online diploma courses to job seekers.

Co-founders John Wall and Jesse Sahely, advised by former AFL boss and minority shareholder Andrew Demetriou, planned a $30 billion college-owning behemoth. Wall's May 2014 memo set the target: enrol 10,000 people a month, generating '$100m a month, or $1.2 billion, a year at 80 per cent profit'. 'Is it sustainable. I'm not sure we need to worry about that,' it read, concluding: 'Lads … Let's make some serious money.'

Instead, the ACCC fined the group $4.5 million over high-pressure sales tactics, and Acquire collapsed into administration on May 12, 2017, owing creditors $147 million and stranding tens of thousands of students.

Liquidators from Cor Cordis told the Supreme Court of Victoria the group potentially traded while insolvent for 10 months, illegally incurring about $22 million in debts, after executives warned directors in late 2016 of personal criminal liability. Some $30 million in shareholder loans flowed out — $1.7 million to Demetriou, 'repaid' through discretionary bonuses, over $2 million to Sahely, and money to horse-racing media venture G1X.

The business model was arbitrage on a government loan scheme, not education — so it lived and died with subsidy rules.

Enrolment targets were set with sustainability explicitly waved off in writing, memos liquidators later read out in court.

Loans to 'the boys' — shareholders and a horse-racing venture — drained cash as the core business soured.

Directors kept trading for months after being warned of personal criminal liability for insolvent trading.

When a memo asks 'is it sustainable?' and answers 'we don't need to worry about that', the business is the answer: subsidised demand ends and so does everything built on enrolling fast.

Liquidators led by Cor Cordis's Barry Wight ran public examinations in the Supreme Court of Victoria in 2019, testing Demetriou — who said briefing documents describing him as 'executive chairman' were wrong — and co-founder Sahely, who called the shareholder loans dividend payments from the good times. The collapse became a landmark of Australia's vocational-education rort era.