BEN HARVEY: WiseTech shareholders thought the worst was over then the police came knocking

WiseTech shareholders could be forgiven for taking a stiff drink.

Over the past few months, holding shares in this company has been the financial equivalent of jumping out of a fighter jet and landing on the Chamonix black run.

This equity is not for the faint hearted or for punters who get queasy. The share price has lurched so violently investors have been feeling like they’re pulling G-forces while on their Commsec accounts.

It’s the kind of ride you expect in a small-cap mining stock; not a logistics company.

WiseTech Global creates software that makes sure that a container ship goes to the right berth at the right port at the right time and that the right customs form is filled out before the right truck takes the right cargo to the right freight train.

The company is like WD40 for the international trade system. It makes sure there are no friction points so we can get our Temu fast.

Logistics companies should be boring. For a long time, WiseTech was. In a good way.

It’s a true Australian success story and an unusual one because it doesn’t involve blowing up parts of the countryside and shipping it to Asia so it can loaded into blast furnaces and turned into aircraft carriers.

The company was founded in 1994 by coding nerd Richard White. Richard put the right ones next to the right zeroes and made it easier for Australia’s freight handlers.

Our Outback Truckers don’t realise it, but their jobs are a little easier because of Richard’s ingenuity with software.

WiseTech debuted on the Australian Securities Exchange in 2016 with a valuation of $1 billion.

It was $4 a share back then. Last year, the stock reached a high of $135.

That’s a Fortescue Metals Group kind of run.

Then, news emerged that a Sydney beautician named Linda Rogan had been having an affair with White while living in a mansion he bought for her.

And things were no longer boring.

It got even less boring when White’s wife, Zena Nasser, found out about her hubby’s lover.

That was bad; Nasser’s standing as a high-profile lawyer made it worse.

Thus, Richard’s life started imploding on various front pages of various newspapers.

Within days of the sex scandal breaking it emerged that the Rogan fling wasn’t Tricky Dicky’s first rodeo.

He’d also been having it off with a woman named Christine Kontos, who worked for a logistics product firm, and had awarded a lucrative contract to another lover.

It’d be fair to say Richard had been personally delivered a lot of cargo over the preceding few years.

The WiseTech board grudgingly agreed to an independent review of White’s actions.

The word grudgingly is used advisedly not only because White was founder and chief executive of, and biggest shareholder in, WiseTech, but also because independent reviews are like a box of chocolates — where every chocolate is an embarrassing and offensive turd.

You never know what you’re gonna get? Yeah, you do — an embarrassing and offensive turd.

White stood down as CEO in October 2024. The stock took a dive from the $135 record it set the previous month.

In February of this year the stock tanked, again, when the chairman and three directors quit en masse.

Then things got really weird.

In a few frenetic weeks the disgraced founder wins back control of his company by becoming executive chairman; shrugs off the results of that independent turd inquiry; says bugger off then to AustralianSuper when the fund sold its stock in protest; installs the old chairman who quit the year before as new independent director; and signs a new employment contract that guarantees he’s in power for 10 years.

He was almost as busy in the boardroom as he had been between the sheets.

Oh, and he found time to borrow a lazy $3b to fund an aggressive expansion into the United States — a country whose predilection for electing presidents who have affairs with porn stars makes it less squeamish about the governance implications of sexual impropriety.

Shareholders thought the worst was over. Between April and July the stock rose from $74 a share to $120. But nobody ruins a party quite like a police officer so when Hawaii 5-0 crashed through the front door of WiseTech’s headquarters in Alexandria, the music stopped.

And the stock crashed. Again.

WiseTech Global confirmed in an ASX announcement on Tuesday that the corporate cops (the Australian Securities and Investments Commission) and the actual cops (the Australian Federal Police) had executed a search warrant which required “the production of documents regarding alleged trading in WiseTech shares by Richard White and three WiseTech employees during the period from late 2024 to early 2025”.

You can bet the investor relations consultant tasked with drafting that statement required a stiff drink.

We don’t know if anyone’s done anything wrong and are not suggesting that they have.

But we do know WiseTech is embroiled in a scandal.

Again.

And the stock is tanking.

Again.

And there could be at least one more turd in that box of chocolates that shareholders have to eat.

Again.