At the time of the group's collapse, it was headed by Bill Farrow and former Geelong Football Club player David Clarke.

[citation needed] On 13 February 1990, the state treasurer Rob Jolly and attorney general Andrew McCutcheon held a press conference and assured the public that Pyramid was sound.

However, his office lacked both legislative powers (under the Building Societies Act 1986) and sufficient staff to supervise 250 deposit-taking institutions.

[citation needed] The vast majority of the losses suffered by the Farrow Group had been from ventures into commercial property, frequently lending aggressively to speculative projects.

Staff were paid a commission on new lending business, which is proper enough, but also for improving bad loans, which gave them an incentive to rearrange the affairs of borrowers who were in default.

[citation needed] He expected deregulation to force down what had traditionally been quite wide margins, to be replaced by an emphasis on fees for services.

That analysis was correct, but in accepting small spreads the group was particularly vulnerable if bad loans reduced its effective interest income.

One of the holders, Phillip Lauren, then sued the government and ministers on the basis he had been misled by their advice to keep his money in, and a group of the shareholders marched on state parliament in September 1992.

Depositors with funds in the building society retrieved their balances (as calculated from June 1989 without any interest) at 100 cents in the dollar finally paid in 1995.

[3] On 23 March 2008, Warren Meyer, a former bankrupt who owed $2.3M to the Pyramid Building Society, went missing on a bushwalk, although it was believed that he might have been killed by deer hunters.

[4] Another business venture headed by Bill Farrow, a media company named Switch, collapsed in February 2015, owing over $0.5M, due to "poor financial control including a lack of records and trading losses".