Lark Distilling managing director and CEO Geoff Bainbridge has resigned due to an alleged blackmail campaign.
The board of the ASX listed company were told about the incident on Tuesday night (15 Feb), with Bainbridge quitting the following day.
Bainbridge told The Sydney Morning Herald that he had been stalked for six years over an incident in a South-East Asian country, just after he had left the burger business he co-founded, Grill’d.
He had a limited recollection of the night, but the following morning two men showed him a video of him smoking ice from a glass pipe. They threatened to expose him and demanded money.
“Your brain doesn’t think logically in this situation. You run scenarios in your head. The reality for me is there is footage of me consuming class-A drugs in a foreign country. That has serious ramifications,” Bainbridge said.
Bainbridge gave them around $3000 and didn’t hear anything more until 2019 when he began receiving WhatsApp messages reminding him of the video and demanding more money.
Over the next two years he made 14 payments totalling around $9000, the SMH said.
He sought advice from a global risk consultancy who gave him two options - pay or disengage. He chose the latter. On Tuesday he was contacted by The Australian newspaper.
Bainbridge told the SMH he accepts he was the “author of his own misfortune” and his position at Lark was untenable.
Bainbridge became a major shareholder in the distillery on 23 December 2021 after buying around 572,000 shares. He bought shares worth a net total of around $3.2 million over the last 12 months.
He was appointed managing director in 2019 and since then Lark’s share price has increased from 0.4 cents to $4.55 the day before the video was released.
The share price fell more than 20 per cent following the announcement and is currently trading at around $3.75.
Lark has appointed non-executive director Laura McBain as the interim managing director. McBain was managing director of Maggie Beer Holdings from 2017-19, and prior to that was Bellamys Australia’s CEO and managing director from 2007, and after it was listed on the ASX from 2014-2017.
