🔍 EXPOSED: How the Victorian Legal Services Board (VLSB) Used Public Funds to Destroy Law Firms — and Got Away With It<br />In this jaw-dropping follow-up to our last exposé, we take viewers deeper into the shadowy world of legal regulation in Victoria, revealing how the Victorian Legal Services Board (VLSB) and its appointed external managers — including Howard Rapke and Nick Curran — allegedly drained hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Public Purpose Fund (PPF) while devastating the very law firms they were appointed to oversee.<br />🎥 KEY REVELATIONS:<br />📅 On August 22, 2022, Mr Rapke stormed into a Melbourne law firm, mocked former directors, and began issuing massive invoices — $92,035 in just two weeks, with no itemised breakdown.<br />💸 His invoices charged for hours racked up by an entire team — including partners, solicitors, and special counsel — even though only Mr Rapke was authorised to bill under the Legal Profession Uniform Law.<br />📉 The firm’s clients were left in the lurch. Files were withheld, cases abandoned, and critical hearings missed — leading to default judgments and irreversible damage.<br />🧾 Later bills arrived with no explanation — just vague reimbursements and hourly charges from multiple team members. Still, the Public Purpose Fund was used to pay them.<br />🧠 A revealing audio recreation from court transcripts shows a Legal Services Board employee acknowledging that payments were made with minimal scrutiny, based on vague impressions of proportionality — not actual legal assessment.<br />⚖️ And this isn’t an isolated case. Similar stories emerged from lawyers Glenn Thexton and Thomas Flitner, whose firms were also managed by Nick Curran and billed over $800,000 combined, allegedly without a proper legal basis or consent.<br />💰 What is the Public Purpose Fund?<br /> It’s a $3.2 billion trust, funded from interest on client funds, meant to support legal aid, community legal centres, law reform, and access to justice. But instead, this fund has been used to bankroll private legal contractors, with no independent oversight, no transparency, and no way for affected parties to dispute the charges.<br />🧩 THE SYSTEMIC PROBLEM:<br />The VLSB appoints private firms to manage law practices.<br />Those firms issue invoices — sometimes inflated or unjustified.<br />The VLSB pays them out of the Public Purpose Fund.<br />Then they threaten to recover the costs from the very firms they dismantled.<br />If challenged, firms are told they lack standing to object — because the regulator, not the firm, was technically the “client.”<br />This is not just about dodgy billing. It’s a fundamental failure of accountability — where public money is spent behind closed doors, lawyers are silenced, and firms are dismantled in the name of “regulation.”<br />⚠️ WARNING: This video contains disturbing insights into financial misconduct, systemic regulatory abuse, and the silencing of legal professionals who dared to speak out.<br />📢 SHARE this video if you believe in justice and accountable use of public funds.
