Source : the age
The trial of a Gold Coast filmmaker accused of a multimillion-dollar fraud has been delayed after the jury was dismissed and the judge ruled a mistrial.
Luke Sparke, 42, will face a fresh trial at a date to be revealed in coming weeks.
He was facing 17 counts of fraud in Brisbane’s District Court over offences allegedly committed between February 2017 and November 2019 when he was a bankrupt. He had pleaded not guilty.
The charges relate to how Sparke secured loans to make his movies, and the fact he gave personal guarantees for those loans while allegedly failing to disclose his status as a bankrupt.
But on just the second day of evidence in a case originally scheduled to take four weeks, the trial was adjourned.
Judge Glen Cranny discharged the jury after the prosecution introduced some late evidence. The defence argued this was unfair and sought to have the charges dismissed.
But Cranny ruled on Tuesday that there had been no improper conduct on the prosecution’s part, and that the trial would begin again with a fresh jury at a date yet to be set.
Sparke still faces the possibility of prison, with non-disclosure of bankruptcy when obtaining credit of more than $3000 carrying a potential jail term of up to five years.
On the second day of the trial, in evidence heard before a jury, accountant Terence Rose – who has managed the administration of a number of Sparke-aligned failed companies through insolvency experts SV Partners – told the court that the filmmaker’s debts were well into the eight-figure range.
“At one stage … it was around about $11 million, and there were some secured creditors there as well, which were about $6 million,” Rose said. “I recall by the time I did the dividend, they were probably up towards about $17 million.”
The company in question was Sparkefilms Pty Ltd, through which Sparke made the science-fiction alien invasion film Occupation, released in May 2018. That company entered administration in early 2018 and was wound up in August 2020.
The film was made with a reported $6 million budget, with most of the funds raised through loans from private investors. According to boxofficemojo.com, the film made just under $US22,000 at the cinema.
Four of the people who lent money to Sparkefilms were slated to testify before the court, but they represented just a fraction of those who claim to have lost money through their association with the company, of which Sparke and his wife, Carly Sparke, were directors.
Terence van der Velde, who was Sparke’s bankruptcy trustee at SV Partners, told the court: “We identified a number of creditors that weren’t included in the statement of affairs … I think we ended up with about 74 creditors.”
Tika Shelton, who led the investigation by the Australian Financial Security Authority that ultimately led to charges being laid by the Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions, also testified that Sparke had misled one of his principal backers, Jim Carney.
She told the court that Carney advanced money to pay off the debt of almost $700,000 that had resulted in Sparke’s bankruptcy in 2017.
“Mr Carney asked Mr Sparke for a statutory declaration declaring all of his debts that he owed at that point in time, which related to personal liabilities and … the debts associated and liabilities with all of his companies as well, so Mr Carney could make an informed decision in how to proceed,” she said.
“There were quite a few creditors and amounts missing from the statutory declaration that was provided to Mr Carney by Mr Sparke. So the true volume, or true dollar value, was not declared to Mr Carney.”
The question of what was and was not disclosed by Sparke was at the centre of the case against him.
The judge is expected to set a fresh date for the new trial in coming weeks.
Sparke, meanwhile, is pressing ahead with plans to make more movies and a TV series called Dinosaurs of the Wild West, primarily using crowdfunding and income ostensibly received from his previous efforts.
His most recent outing was the $7 million Vietnam War meets dinosaurs mash-up Primitive War, which has earned about $US1.2 million at the box office since its release in August, 2025.
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