By Crikey reporter Sophie Vorrath


Remember the missing Vizard millions? Five years and a couple of trials after Steve Vizard claimed $3 million was siphoned out of his Westpac bank account by his then bookkeeper Roy Hilliard, the bank seems no closer to locating the missing money.

Which is a problem, because in 2000 Westpac returned the money to Vizard on the now disgraced businessman’s word that Hilliard had stolen the money and transferred it into his own business, Information Age Travel.

Back then, Vizard and Westpac set about pursuing Hilliard for the money. But instead of tracing the millions, the pursuit exposed Vizard’s own improper business and financial dealings and, as Elisabeth Sexton and Kate Askew put it in The Sydney Morning Herald, “ripped the facade from the former television comic’s carefully nurtured image as a company director, philanthropist and pillar of the arts community.” Vizard refused to give evidence against Hilliard on the grounds he might incriminate himself and the ex-bookkeeper was found guilty only of false accounting.

So where does this leave Westpac? The bank is still out of pocket the $2 million-odd it paid Vizard, and its civil action against Hilliard & IAT is still under review after it was suspended pending the outcome of the criminal trial.

“As far as we are concerned, the (civil) matter is proceeding,” says Hilliard’s solicitor Magda Kron. Kron attended a directions hearing with Westpac’s lawyers Mallesons last week, in which a timetable was set down for future conduct of the matter.

But Westpac spokesman David Lording says the bank has “made no decision” about whether or not to proceed against Hilliard and is currently conducting a “thorough review” of the matter before moving ahead.

So who will the bank believe – an apparently broke, unemployed former book keeper living in rural Victoria, or a self-confessed insider trader whose business reputation has been destroyed?