Nant Whisky's barrel buyback wiped out investors — Tasmania's biggest fraud investigation

Nant Whisky raised money from small investors with a seductive scheme: buy your own barrel of Tasmanian whisky, then sell it back for a guaranteed return. Production 'largely hinged' on that money. In late 2016 founder Keith Batt, a onetime trainee priest turned developer, filed for personal bankruptcy over an unrelated venture; when reports of the bankruptcy and of stuck investors appeared in early 2017, new money dried up and existing investors rushed for the door. The collapse wiped out investors who had put in up to $20 million and sparked Tasmania's largest fraud investigation.

The trouble predated the headlines. Deloitte receivers later appointed by the tax office said Nant Distillery may have traded while insolvent from as early as June 2014. And the credibility the scheme relied on was incestuous: a July 2015 valuation putting the group at $14.4 million, commissioned by lender BCU before it took over a $2.3 million mortgage, rested on Nant's own accountants' forecasts of $13.1 million net annual profit by 2020 — and within weeks the valuer merged firms with Nant's own accountant, despite having declared no conflicting relationships in the valuation itself.

The collapse sorted winners from losers along lines of influence. Batt says he lost $5–7 million and was bankrupted. His lawyer David Dowd — simultaneously a Nant director, the Batts' personal lawyer, and, from May 2016, Nant's largest secured creditor after converting $2.5 million of unpaid fees into a charge over the estate and distillery — was paid. Dowd's $1.6 million Christmas Eve invoice, consolidating years of re-billed invoices, was amended to $1.1 million at the finance manager's request, on the accountant's advice, 'so we don't raise any unnecessary flags with the ATO'.

The buyback scheme made solvency dependent on a constant stream of new investor money — structurally a refinancing operation, not a whisky business with its own earnings.

It kept trading through the trouble: receivers said the distillery may have traded while insolvent from June 2014.

It borrowed against a valuation built on its own profit forecasts, prepared by an accountant whose firm merged with the valuer's weeks later.

Its governance let one man be director, company lawyer and largest secured creditor at once — a governance expert called it potentially 'a fairly egregious case' of unmanaged conflicts.

A guaranteed buyback is refinancing in costume: the promise survives only while new money keeps arriving, and when it stops, the conflicts inside the rescue decide who gets paid.

Batt, bankrupt and living in a rental house, blamed betrayal by his lawyer, accountant and lender; the trio denied wrongdoing or did not respond, and several allegations remained before the courts. Tax-office receivers examined Dowd's fees as director-related transactions but found no legal basis to claw them back. BCU chief executive Lyndon Kingston, an ex-banking regulator, was sacked in 2017 and accused of $10,000-a-month kickbacks through a trust; he denied it and the dispute settled. The ABC's findings ran in March 2019 as the fraud investigation continued.