James Paspaley is the executive director of the Paspaley Group of Companies and the third generation of his family in the Australian pearling business. His grandfather, Nicholas Paspaley MBE, came to Australia from the Greek island of Kastellorizo as a child in 1919, became a pearling master with his own lugger at 19 and, after the collapse of the mother-of-pearl trade in the 1950s, helped bring cultured pearling to Australia with Japanese specialists; he died in 1984. His father, Nick Paspaley AC, joined the company in 1969, developed the cultivation methods that made Paspaley the leading producer of cultured South Sea pearls, and is the group's chairman.
The family-controlled group, based in Darwin, includes Paspaley Pearls, the wholesale Paspaley Pearling Company, property, aviation, pastoral and marine engineering businesses and Bunnamagoo Wines. As executive director James Paspaley oversees this wider portfolio as well as the pearl business.
He has spoken publicly for the company on the pearl market and on sustainability. Interviewed in 2016, when Paspaley was sponsoring Audi Hamilton Island Race Week for the fifth year, he said the global financial crisis had been tough on the fine pearl market, that Australians were among the greatest consumers of their home-grown gem, and that the bigger threat was confusion caused by large quantities of inferior farmed pearls from Indonesia, China and the Philippines. At a sustainable pearls forum he argued that the first step in sustainability is preserving wild stock and the environment, and that the pearling industry is environmentally benign, even beneficial, because it creates influential advocates for protecting remote coastlines.
Sources are thin: Casadi has not verified his date of birth, education, when he became executive director, or his earlier roles in the company.