The private credit cockroaches eating our rich-listers

September 17, 2026 — 5:00am

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It was shaping up to be a diabolical year for Sydney Swans chairman Andrew Pridham, even before he had to get to grips with the suspension of key players ahead of the AFL’s finals season.

The asset management giant Pridham co-founded, ASX-listed MA Financial Services, was getting smashed by nervous investors fretting if it was the next private lender saddled with loans to a failed developer like bankrupt pub tsar Jon Adgemis, or collapsed home builder The Bathla Group.

Investors recalled the prophetic words of J. P. Morgan boss Jamie Dimon, who warned – after similar collapses in the US last year with heavy exposure to private credit – that “when you see one cockroach, there are probably more”.

There was no hiding these concerns from Pridham. As the Swans crisis unfolded, he was also bracing for MA Financial to announce limits on investor withdrawals from a fund with exposure to private credit. The move would protect the fund from having to sell assets to meet investor redemptions, but it sent MA Financial shares plunging.

The share rout took Pridham’s personal losses on his MA Financial shares to more than $93 million this year, despite the firm’s record half-year result in August and the fact that less than one-third of its private credit lending was exposed to real estate.

The financial trend raising the alarm from Wall Street to western Sydney

MA Financial chief executive........

© The Age