Warnings over Geoff Bainbridge’s drug use were allegedly flagged more than two years ago.
According to The Australian, the board of Lark Distilling were told in December 2019 that Mr Bainbridge – who at the time was the company’s chief executive – was allegedly a “coke head”.
It comes as the fallout from a video of Mr Bainbridge smoking an ice pipe continues, with more than $70m wiped from the ASX-listed whiskey producer’s market valuation, and has left retail investors out of pocket.
Mr Bainbridge – a co-founder of the Grill’d burger chain and a major investor in the Samantha Wills jewellery brand – denies being a drug user, but resigned from the company last week after the video emerged.
According to The Australian, correspondence sent by the company’s major shareholder Chris Malcolm to Lark chairman David Deerie and secretary Melanie Leydin shows concerns about potential drug use were raised in December 2019.
In the letter, Mr Malcolm claimed the distillery’s founder and ambassador Bill Lark had told staff, shareholders and suppliers Mr Bainbridge was a “coke head”.
“(Board directors) Laurent Ly and Warren Randle were told these stories directly from Bill Lark,” Mr Malcom’s letter reads, according to The Australian.
“You are aware of this and I saw it as being damaging to the board directors of Australian Whisky Holding and detrimental to the shareholders.”
Lark told the newspaper it had been “made aware of new information that has been recently reported in the media”, but did not respond to specific questions on whether the board had acted on Mr Malcolm’s letter.
The board is assessing the new information, and said they will “determine if further action is required”.
Mr Lark says claims he told shareholders and directors that Mr Bainbridge had a drug problem were “not true”.
“I woxjmtzywuldn’t have known that,” he told The Australian.
The revelation that the board may have known about his drug use comes after Nine Newspapers were forced to delete a story they had written about the former executive, issuing a statement that they had been “badly misled”.
In the story, Mr Bainbridge told the journalist he had been the victim of an elaborate six-year extortion racket, and that the video of him smoking ice was from six years ago in Asia.
This was disproved when The Australian revealed the video had been filmed in Mr Bainbridge’s home in the last 18 months.
The Nine journalist wrote on Monday evening that Mr Bainbridge “appears to have misled the Age and Herald about where and when (the video) was taken”.
