Adelaide broker Paul Meier has been given a suspended jail sentence of three years and seven months for making fake loan applications in clients’ names.

He admitted 16 charges of dishonestly dealing with documents over a year from November 2010.

District Court judge Simon Stretton says Meier obtained money from Premium Funding Pty Ltd by submitting loan applications for non-existent insurance policies.

Meier was a 50% owner of Barker Meier Insurance Brokers, which was formed in 1991 and had offices in Adelaide and Melbourne.

“Your offending was a deliberate and repeated course of conduct… designed to dishonestly extract money from a finance provider to prop up your business,” Judge Stretton said.

The business was in trouble partly due to the way money had been inappropriately transferred within it, the judge says.

Meier obtained $1.03 million from the finance company before repaying about $730,000 over a year. When the brokerage was put into liquidation $300,789 was outstanding. No further repayments have been made, the judgement says.

Meier must enter into a good behaviour bond for three years, be under supervision for 15 months and undertake 300 hours of community service.

Judge Stretton criticised the Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s (ASIC) handling of the case.

“ASIC investigated your conduct and, somewhat unbelievably, neither prosecuted nor banned you from the financial services industry,” he said.

In January last year the regulator instead secured an enforceable undertaking from Meier to permanently refrain from providing financial services or engaging in credit activity.

An ASIC spokesman says the matter was already under investigation by SA police when it was bought to the regulator’s attention.

“In these circumstances, which are not unusual, ASIC will not conduct an investigation, because to do so would not be a sensible use of resources,” the spokesman told insuranceNEWS.com.au.

He says the enforceable undertaking gave a quicker regulatory outcome that would have been no better had the matter gone to an administrative hearing, and it also applied to the credit industry.