When the Jabiru-1 satellite for NewSat was being built at Lockheed Martin’s Sunnyvale, California plant in the early 2010s, the project appeared to be the start of something truly important. This little Australian company was created in 1987, relisted, reimagined, and now pursuing an audacious goal: launching Australia’s first commercial Ka-band satellite into orbit.
The funding was available. The US Export-Import Bank, Standard Chartered, Credit Suisse, Lé Générale, and the French export credit insurance Coface put together US$600 million. Before a single rocket took off, NewSat had already sold about US$700 million of the satellite’s capacity. Australia’s communications minister at the time, Malcolm Turnbull, described the business as “pretty capable.”
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It never got off the ground. NewSat was in administration by April 2015. It was completely liquidated by August. When payments halted, Lockheed Martin claimed ownership of the partially constructed satellite by exercising its contractual rights. The same week, Arianespace suspended the launch arrangement. Lockheed Martin had already received US$207 million from NewSat. The US$56 million that had been given to Arianespace had vanished. With debts of over US$280 million to Ex-Im Bank and US$108 million to Coface, the satellite company had failed. An estimated $200 million in investor funds were lost. Property tycoon Ching Chiat Kwong of Singapore, one of its supporters, claims he lost $100 million.
On April 21, 2026, eleven years later, the Supreme Court of Victoria started considering a case that preliminary rulings have called as one of the most complicated cases the court has likely ever heard. The banks and credit insurers are being sued directly by the liquidators of NewSat, who are supported by Ching, who amassed his wealth in Singapore through his publicly traded business Oxley Holdings and has committed tens of millions of dollars to see this case through.
The lenders’ failure to uphold the loan arrangements they had signed is a straightforward point. They stopped NewSat from paying Lockheed Martin and Arianespace the progress payments that would have kept the project going by taking money out or refusing to advance it. According to this interpretation, NewSat’s failure was not the cause of the crash, but rather the banks’ violation of contract.
The defendants have a different perspective, and their argument is well-founded. According to reports, the lenders were becoming increasingly concerned about Adrian Ballintine, the CEO of NewSat. His management style had garnered attention, and it wasn’t necessarily the kind that a business with US$600 million in funding wants to be in the public eye.
Ballintine’s reputation for corporate planes, lavish restaurant lunches, and a luxury boat company generated concerns about the true use of the company’s funds and his attention. In the end, ASIC accused him of three counts of fabricating $357,000 worth of invoices sent to a business he was connected to. His actions were deemed by a judge to be “knowingly dishonest and financially motivated.” His $15,000 fine was viewed by many as insignificant for behavior that precipitated the demise of a company that owed hundreds of millions to foreign financiers.
The exact cause of NewSat’s demise is still up for debate. The lenders’ anxiety might have been warranted by Ballintine’s actions. It’s also plausible that the lenders withdrew funding from a project with genuine commercial merit—US$700 million in forward sales is not insignificant—after becoming alarmed by growing governance problems, and that the withdrawal became self-fulfilling.
Without the loan drawdowns, the business would not be able to pay Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin sent out a notice of default. US$160 million was taken by COFACE. Everything else happened one after the other. A court will be asked to decide which chain of causation is correct in this case.
Seeing this happen over 10 years after the satellite crashed before it could reach the sky is remarkable because of how persistent it is. Ching Chiat Kwong has been financing a lawsuit against some of the world’s most heavily litigated financial companies for years. According to the court’s preliminary rulings, the case is “very large.” Depending on the technique, the claimed damages could reach $5 billion USD. It is anticipated that the experiment would go for several months. Liability is denied by the banks.
If the Jabiru-1 satellite had been launched, it would have covered most of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East with broadband. Rather, it turned into an especially costly reminder that there might be a significant discrepancy between “funding in place” and “mission accomplished” in infrastructure finance, and that this discrepancy appears to be litigable.
