‘The winning candidate is my wife’: Court docs allege Market Herald breaches

afr.com:

The former managing director of The Market Herald has been accused of using company cards to fund luxury holidays and creating a flawed recruitment process to hire his ex-wife who charged thousands of dollars for work that was largely copy and pasted from the internet.

In a statement of claim filed to the Federal Court, Jagdip Singh Sangha, also known as Jag Sanger, is accused of breaching his statutory and fiduciary duties during his four-year tenure at the publicly listed publisher, which operates the HotCopper trading forum.

Jag Sanger was a co-founder of The Market Herald. Ross Swanborough

Court documents allege Mr Sanger used company cash to buy thousands of dollars worth of luxury accommodation around Western Australia as well as tickets to a New York Yankees baseball game and several televisions worth $17,000.

Excerpts of emails contained in the statement of claim show Mr Sanger in May 2020 messaged the chairman of The Market Herald outlining his intention to hire his ex-wife as an education editor for the publication.

“The winning candidate for writing is err,, my wife. She is an education writer. We have looked for others’,” Mr Sanger wrote.

Lawyers for the publisher allege no other candidates had been sought and no job advertisements had been published for the role that ultimately paid Mr Sanger’s wife more than $160,000.

Between July and September 2020, Ms Sanger submitted directly to her husband more than 50 articles, most of which court documents allege were “wholly or substantially comprised of passages copied from school websites, Wikipedia entries or other school directory websites”.

However, in a defence filed to the court, Mr Sanger claims he separated from his wife in late 2019 and that it was “common