Already embarrassed over his past business dealings, Robert Gerard is a former Reserve Bank board member and Liberal Party donor who shortly after selling Clipsal to French Company Schneider Electric settled a $150 million tax bill with the Australian tax office. He was also forced to step down from his position on the Reserve Bank board.
Gerard and his family are at the heart of the allegations being made by the Smart Company that back in 1995 and 1996 they stole the Smart Company technology for the advancement of the C Bus automation system. ChannelNews has been told that Schneider Electric, who aquired Gerard Industries, the Clipsal brand and the C Bus technolgy in 2005, will hold both Robert Gerard and Gerard Industries liable for any payouts if they lose the upcoming court case.
The history of C Bus goes back more than a decade with questions set to be raised as to whether Federal money that was given to Gerard Industries under a Liberal Government was actually spent in Australia on the development of C Bus technology, or whether it was channelled into an offshore Company called Clipsal Integrated Systems which was 49.3 percent owned by GP Industries Limited ("GP Industries"), a 85.7 percent owned subsidiary of Gold Peak Industries, a Singapore based Company run by Victor Lo a long-time friend and business partner of Robert Gerard.
Investigations by ChannelNews and SmartHouse have raised some interesting questions about the relationship between Robert Gerard and Victor Lo and another former employee of Clipsal, Bernard Emby, who is now based in Asia. During the past few weeks ChannelNews has obtained hundreds of pages of documents relating to the development of C Bus, Gerard Industries, reports by accounting groups on the aquisition by Scheinder Electric of Clipsal and Gerard Industries, as well as documentation on matters before the Federal Court.
(ChannelNews will run a separate story on Clipsal operations in Asia and their relationship with Emby and other Asia Pacific Companies.)
Central to the fight between Clipsal and the Smart Company (Smart) is the establishment of who developed the C Bus technology back in the early 1990s, and whether prior to the establishment of a relationship with the Smart Company whether C Bus was actually a smart system.
