Reports of an Australian police inquiry into a visa-for-sex allegation knocked billions off the logistics software firm, four months after White returned to its leadership.
Richard White, the billionaire founder and executive chairman of the Australian logistics software company WiseTech Global, has denied any involvement in human trafficking after reports that police are investigating a claim he used a woman’s immigration status to obtain sex.
The denial, issued through the company on 22 June 2026, did little to steady the stock, which fell sharply as the news spread.
WiseTech shares dropped as much as 14% in early trading in Sydney before settling around 12% lower at A$32.52, cutting the company’s market value to roughly A$11bn (about $7.7bn).
The fall was among the steepest single-day moves in the company’s history and came without any allegation having been tested in court.
The reports concern an inquiry by the Australian Federal Police’s human exploitation taskforce. According to Bloomberg, the former head of Kyckr, another firm that White controls, told police that White invented a reason to hire a woman and supplied false information to secure her a visa.
None of those claims has been proven, and White, through WiseTech, rejects the suggestion that he was involved in human trafficking.
It is a difficult sequence for a company that had only recently drawn a line under an earlier set of controversies. White stepped down as chief executive in late 2024 amid separate sexual misconduct allegations, which he also contested, and returned to the leadership in February 2026 as executive chairman.
The latest reports landed barely four months into that comeback.
WiseTech is not a household name, but it sits close to the centre of global trade. Its software runs behind the scenes at thousands of freight forwarders and logistics companies, and its flagship platform is used by a large share of the world’s biggest freight handlers, including names such as FedEx, UPS, and DHL.
A governance shock at the top of a company embedded that deeply in supply-chain plumbing is the sort of thing institutional investors watch closely, which is part of why the share-price reaction was so brisk.
For shareholders, the immediate problem is less the specific claim, which is unproven and contested, than the pattern.
A founder whose grip on the company has already been the subject of board upheaval is now the subject of a police inquiry, and the market is being asked once again to price the risk that a single individual poses to a A$11bn business.
The previous round of allegations triggered boardroom resignations; investors have reason to wonder whether this one does the same.
The earlier episode is worth recalling in detail, because it set the template for how the market reads news about White.
In late 2024, a series of allegations about his personal conduct and his dealings with the company prompted an independent review and a wave of director departures, and his exit from the chief executive role was framed at the time as a clean break.
His return in February, as executive chairman rather than CEO, was presented as a more constrained arrangement. The latest reports test whether that arrangement is constrained enough.
WiseTech, for its part, has limited itself to conveying White’s denial. The company has not said whether the board will take any action, whether White will step back during the inquiry, or what governance review, if any, it is considering.
The Australian Federal Police, as a matter of practice, does not generally confirm the details of continuing investigations, which leaves shareholders reliant on company disclosures and press reporting rather than any official account of where the inquiry stands.
What happens next is largely out of the company’s hands. A police inquiry runs on its own timeline, and a claim of this kind can sit unresolved for a long stretch while the market is left to guess.
For now, the facts that can be stated plainly are narrow: there is a reported investigation, there is a denial, and several billion dollars of value moved in a single morning on the strength of the gap between them.
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