James Mawhinney makes ‘fighting misinformation’ his next big thing

Mayfair 101 founder James Mawhinney may be fighting a bankruptcy threat while awaiting a retrial on a case seeking to ban him from advertising and fundraising for financial products in the Federal Court. But he's nothing if not incorrigible.

Several years after his funds management collapsed in a blaze of bad publicity and ASIC investigations, he's cobbled together enough cash to buy the media.com domain. He'll use it, he announced last week, to launch a "global online network" which allows users to respond to false stories and narratives, and has partnered up with both PRWeek and the International Public Relations Association as an awards sponsor.

The point of his start-up is a press-annotation system allowing paying users to combat "misinformation" and tell their story, "free from interference".

Mawhinney knows all about, ahem, "interference". Significant effort has been expended by ASIC to halt or hinder him managing other people's money, after one judgment referred to his manner of doing so as "irresponsible and primarily driven for his own benefit at the expense of unitholders".

This publication has been covering Mawhinney’s now-fizzled funds and his cat-and-mouse game with regulators since 2019, memorably once quoting the entrepreneur telling would-be investors he was “not Christopher Skase” (this was worth stating because Mayfair, like Skase, had big plans for developing tourism assets in tropical North Queensland).