Dominique Grubisa’s company admits asset protection claims were misleading

After years of denials, Dominique Grubisa now accepts the asset protection product sold by her company didn’t work as claimed and involved false and misleading representation, as IA reports.

ON 18 AND 19 March, the case brought by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) against Dominique Grubisa and her company, Master Wealth Control Pty Ltd (MWC), was heard before Justice Ian Jackman in the Federal Court in Sydney. The hearing, which was scheduled to run for five days, was concluded in two.

Grubisa, who was expected to give evidence, did not and did not even turn up to the Court.

The ACCC case involved several alleged representations made by MWC regarding the “Real Estate Rescue” and the “Vestey Trust” structure which the ACCC says were false or misleading. In the case of the Vestey Trust structure, the ACCC alleged that MWC claimed the structure would provide complete protection from creditors when this was not the case.

Dominique Grubisa faces Federal Court in ACCC case

The ACCC has taken Dominique Grubisa to Federal Court after revealing "false or misleading" practices within her asset protection program.

On the morning of the second day of the hearing, counsel for Grubisa and MWC, Gregory Sirtes SC informed the Court that he was instructed to concede the declarations sought by the ACCC in respect of Vestey Trust representation. That is, it was accepted that the representations were false or misleading.

Throughout Sirtes’ concluding submissions, he took Justice Jackman to obvious flaws in the structure sold by MWC.

Sirtes submitted that if Ms Grubisa had the belief there was no efficacy in her program:

“It would be amazing that... and it would be, your Honour, perverse and outrageous if armed with knowledge that this simply didn’t work that she then took no steps [to fix the problem].”

He suggested that:

“The very fact that she does nothing about it and just continues to grind out these documents without attempting to fix them... on the basis that no accountant is ever going to query... or any lawyer is ever going to query any of this, your Honour, would be brazen in the extreme.”

As we reported in March 2022, Grubisa was aware that other lawyers had raised serious concerns about her claims and numerous of her former clients had made complaints to regulators.

EXCLUSIVE: Dominique Grubisa offers 'protecction' amid scathing criticism

Dominique Grubisa is continuing to spruik her services despite criticism from legal professionals and scathing client reviews.

In his submissions, Sirtes suggested that Justice Jackman was being asked to choose between two starkly contrasting positions: that she is “shrewd, calculating and ultimately dishonest” or that, in regard to her asset protection documents, she is “incompetent, despite best intentions.”

His Honour replied: “Or both incompetent and dishonest.”

Some time was spent on how Grubisa could justify that there was a debt equivalent to the equity in the client’s assets when the structure was established.

In the hearing, Justice Jackman asked Mr Sirtes:

“How could any rational person honestly reach the view that the amount of the debt was equal to the amount of the assets on day one?”

It is a matter IA has raised in numerous articles going back to February 2021.

IA has published many stories about Grubisa’s questionable asset protection claims, including articles in:

Stealing from the dead — fair game in Grubisa’s world

Dominique Grubisa involved herself in the misappropriation of money from a deceased estate, as IA reports.

In his closing submissions, Mr James Arnott SC for the ACCC noted that Grubisa had failed to give any evidence herself and that if it “were as simple as [Grubisa] being an honest fool“, she would have come along and told the Court that.

IA has been informed that Grubisa was still promoting her asset protection product as recently as the first weekend of March at a two-day seminar at the Hyatt Regency in Sydney.

Less than a week later (7 March), Grubisa transferred (under dealing AT887899) her interest in a property at The Entrance North in NSW to her husband “without monetary consideration”. The property was previously in her name and that of her husband. This doesn’t look like the actions of someone confident of her own asset protection — more likely the actions of someone seeking to get assets out of their name.

As we reported last September, Grubisa was promoting the asset protection product to the public last July, purportedly on behalf of Assure Lawyers, the incorporated law firm formerly known as DGI Lawyers, of which Grubisa was principal before her ceasing legal practice.

In that article, we asked why Grubisa, who is not entitled to practice law, was doing webinars making representations on behalf of Assure Lawyers.

In the webinar, Grubisa was trotting out her regular claims that:

by having a trust (a friendly creditor) put a caveat on the client’s title, the equity in the property is “soaked up”;
anything that the client has now is really preserved through the trust for their family, not for creditors; and
it protects and preserves what the client has to lose.

Jim Lyons was in the Federal Court as the solicitor representing Grubisa and her company. Lyons is the sole director of Assure Lawyers and also practices in his own right under the name Murphy Lyons Lawyers. Assure Lawyers operates from the same premises in Sydney as businesses operated by Grubisa and her husband, Kevin.

Dominique Grubisa peddles legal product while not entitled to practice

Dominique Grubisa, not entitled to practice law, continues peddling her asset protection ‘product’. However, she's all over the place about who is doing what.

As we noted in our article of last September, the fine print for the asset protection product said that Murphy Lyons (rather than Assure Lawyers) prepares the documents ‘and cannot give the client legal advice’. The document said that Murphy Lyons was not responsible for any document forming part of any service requested by the client and provided legal services to MWC solely for the purpose of that company providing service to the client.

So, according to Grubisa, Lyons (trading as Murphy Lyons) was then the one responsible for drafting the asset protection documents but had no responsibility for those for whom he was preparing the documents. Farcical!

As noted in a recent decision in the Law Society of NSW’s cases against Grubisa, one of the 13 grounds of the Society’s case is that Grubisa represented that MWC was entitled to engage in legal practice, when it was not entitled to do so because it was an unqualified entity.

About unqualified practice, the Law Society of NSW says the following on its website:

‘Unqualified practice exposes the public to the risk of poor legal advice, representation, deception and obtaining professional services from uninsured entities.’

We will have much more to say about the Law Society and when it was alerted to concerns about unqualified practice at an appropriate time.

Readers won’t be surprised to learn that Assure Lawyers (therefore Jim Lyons) is also representing Grubisa in the case brought by the Law Society.

Justice Jackman reserved his decision in the ACCC case.