Simon Wakim built Australia’s XPENG brand. A receiver now controls its cars. What happened in between?
In May 2021, receivers from the firm Cor Cordis took control of Galleria SUV, a Sydney dealership that sold Rolls-Royces, Lamborghinis and Ferraris to people who could afford them. Its sole director was Simon Wakim. Two years later the company was struck off the register.
In March 2026, receivers from the same firm took control of 197 electric cars belonging to TrueEV, the company that brought the Chinese brand XPENG to Australia. Simon Wakim is connected to this one too. Not, it turns out, in the way the symmetry invites you to assume.
That gap between what the symmetry suggests and what the records actually show is the reason this is worth writing carefully. The question underneath it is narrow and answerable: can these two car businesses pay their debts as and when they fall due? In Australian law that is the test for whether a company is solvent, and for both Galleria and TrueEV the primary documents answer it the same way. Who was steering each one is the part where the easy version of the story falls apart.
Who runs TrueEV, and who doesn’t
Start with Wakim, because the assumption to check first is that this is his company. On the record, it isn’t.
TrueEV is a group, not a single business. The parent, True EV Pty Ltd, wholly owns True EV Distribution Pty Ltd, the entity that imported and sold XPENG cars and now sits in receivership. Two men control both, and the same two names run through the group’s holding companies: Jason Clarke, the chief executive, and Nicolas James Politopoulos. Wakim is neither.
The company extracts say so plainly. Searches of True EV Pty Ltd, True EV Distribution, and the holding companies above them (WDUT Pty Ltd, which until early 2025 was called IM EV Pty Ltd, along with Wraithstone Pty Ltd and Merakii House Pty Ltd) show no directorship and no registered shareholding in Simon Wakim’s name. His date of birth, 29 April 1981, is on the Galleria record; it appears nowhere in the TrueEV structure. A trust or a nominee could in theory hold an interest a company extract wouldn’t reveal, and that question is one for him to answer. But on the public register, he owns none of it and runs none of it.
There is one source that puts him closer. In the 30 March judgment, Justice Jackman referred in passing to “Mr Wakim, the founder of True EV.” He used the phrase while recording, then explicitly setting aside, an allegation by XPENG that TrueEV had failed to disclose “previous bankruptcies on the part of Mr Wakim.” The judge made no finding that any bankruptcy happened and gave the allegation no weight. So the word to hold onto is founder. It ties Wakim to the company’s beginnings in a way brand and family alone don’t, but it is not a finding that he holds any office or any shares today, and it sits comfortably beside the ASIC records that show he doesn’t.
What actually links him to TrueEV is two things. The brand, first: he has built Australia’s XPENG brand and its 2026 model plans. And family: Anna Wakim, the group’s head of marketing, was herself briefly a director of Galleria SUV back in 2020. There is a third thread too. The PR agency now chasing TrueEV for unpaid invoices, The PR Hub, acted for Wakim personally in the Galleria years before it worked for TrueEV, the same client followed across two companies.
What broke at TrueEV
TrueEV became XPENG’s exclusive Australian importer and distributor in May 2024, started deliveries that August, and built out a network reported at around 15 dealers and close to 60 service centres. By December 2025 it said it had put more than 2,000 cars on the road. Then, on 1 January 2026, XPENG issued a notice ending TrueEV’s exclusivity, and the relationship came apart fast.
On 3 March the three TrueEV companies sued three arms of XPENG in the Federal Court, alleging unconscionable conduct, breaches of the Competition and Consumer Act and the Franchising Code, and challenging the termination. Sixteen days after that, on 19 March, receivers Daniel Juratowitch and Barry Wight of Cor Cordis were appointed to True EV Distribution. ASIC now lists the company as externally administered, by way of receivership: not liquidation, not voluntary administration. A lender enforcing its security over financed stock is what triggered it.
The clearest evidence on solvency comes from the judge who refused TrueEV an injunction on 30 March. Justice Jackman’s language was direct. The material before him, he said, “strongly suggests an inability on True EV’s part to comply with the payment term in the Distributor Agreement, rather than merely an unwillingness to do so.” The company “does not appear to have the wherewithal to honour its undertaking as to damages,” he found, and “has not been able to provide satisfactory security” for it. Along the way the judgment records where the receivers came from: TrueEV had taken trade finance from “a business called Helios, which has recently appointed receivers over the relevant assets of True EV, comprising some 197 vehicles.” The judgment names the financier only as Helios and gives no more than that; its registered identity is a matter for the securities register.
A lender, a court, and at the same time the people TrueEV owed. XPENG owners who bought G6s from December 2025 said the cashback rebates they were promised went unpaid for months. A supplier was left waiting too: The PR Hub was chasing $38,500 including GST, owed since October 2025, and sent a final letter of demand on 2 March, seventeen days before the receivers walked in. A secured lender, customers and a trade creditor, all unpaid in the same few months. That is what an inability to pay debts as they fall due looks like from the outside, and you don’t need a view about anyone’s character to say it.
TrueEV’s answer, which deserves to be put as plainly as the case against it, is that XPENG did this. In a letter to customers on 6 May, Clarke apologised for going quiet, blamed 16 months of disruption on changes XPENG made, and promised warranties would hold and the cashback backlog would clear. And it is worth remembering TrueEV is the one suing here. If it wins in October, it could be owed a great deal. How that case ends is not something this article can predict.
The earlier business
Galleria SUV ran the same shape of story, and its own ASIC file now confirms the bones of it without relying on the 2021 press coverage. Wakim was sole director from 2017 to October 2022. Cor Cordis, the same firm five years earlier, was appointed in 2021, after the company defaulted, according to a tribunal decision, on a loan of about $2.06 million secured against vehicles worth roughly $3.09 million. Galleria was deregistered in October 2023.
Those years also brought criminal charges, and this is where precision matters more than anywhere else in the story. Wakim was charged in 2021 with 16 offences, among them obtaining a financial advantage by deception and demanding with menaces, with allegations that members of a motorcycle gang were involved. None of the charges stood. Police withdrew 13; a magistrate dismissed the other three. The alleged gang links were never proven in any court. The dealer’s licence was cancelled by NSW Fair Trading regardless.
A separate strand, reported by the Australian Financial Review in January 2024, asks where Galleria’s money came from. A liquidator chasing assets said to trace back to an alleged $70 million tax-fraud scheme run by the late financial adviser Sam Henderson identified a $1.2 million loan from a Henderson-controlled entity into Galleria. On that account Galleria was a recipient of money later alleged to be tainted, one of several unconnected businesses on the list, not a participant in any scheme, and nothing in the reporting suggests Wakim knew where the money started.
The thread the documents actually expose
This is where the records point to a place the brand-and-family version never goes, and where the firmer connection turns out not to involve Wakim at all.
The man who is a director of both True EV Pty Ltd and True EV Distribution, and a co-owner of one of the group’s holding companies alongside Clarke, is Nicolas James Politopoulos. TrueEV’s own website calls him a co-founder of the mid-market lending fund Dinimus Capital; the AFR’s Street Talk column says the same.
The same 2024 AFR investigation into the Henderson affair named a Nicolas Politopoulos among Henderson’s associates, reporting him as a director, at various points between 2015 and 2019, of an entity the liquidator treated as Henderson-linked: Australian Lending and Finance Pty Ltd. That company (ACN 608 620 622) was wound up by court order on 22 February 2024, and the liquidator appointed to it was Darren Vardy, the same Vardy running the Henderson recovery. The name is distinctive and the threads converge. It is a documented line between TrueEV’s current directors and the Henderson matter, a tighter corporate connection than anything that attaches to the man whose name is on the showroom.
What the record shows, and what it doesn’t
Two car businesses tied to Simon Wakim, one he plainly owned and one he is linked to by brand, family and history but does not, on the record, control, have each failed to meet secured debts and ended with the same insolvency firm taking the cars. That is a fair thing to observe, and a documented one.
It is not proof of a pattern in the sense of a method, and the innocent reading has real force. Stock-financed car retail runs on heavy secured borrowing and thin margins; when a manufacturer decides to bring distribution in-house, as BYD did to its own Australian distributor not long ago, it can sink an operator who did nothing unusual. Which of those two readings is the true one is what the October trial, the receivers’ reports, and the answers to the questions below will decide. The honest position today is that the solvency question has an answer and the blame question does not.
