11th hour administrators ousted

Accepting appointments as administrators can be fraught if it comes after winding up proceedings have commenced.

Get the money up front at all costs must be the mantra, but in the following tale iNO can only speculate as to whether Hall Chadwick pair Richard Albarran and Kathleen Vouris were paid what they were promised before they were punted.

That’s partly because they aren’t talking, partly because a week before the second meeting of the Gateway Parramatta Group of Companies (The Group) was to be held a court ordered that the Group be wound up; partly because the $100k mentioned in the administrators’ DIRRI was pledged by embattled property developer and Gateway Group director Sam Fayad and partly because as Albarran and Vouris observed: “These funds have not been received as at the date of signing this DIRRI”.

It’s no surprise that the Hall Chadwick pair received the referral given the firm had previously undertaken work for Fayad in preparing a repayment plan for tax arrears.

A modest degree of clarity in respect of the promised $100k however can be found in their 439A Report, sent to creditors on May 5 in which Vouris said that the administrators had received a $25,000 upfront payment but no indemnity had been provided by Fayad.

That means they’re $75,000 short of where they’d like to be in respect of coverage for remuneration and costs, which they’ll now have to prove for in the Group’s liquidation after the winding up order made on Monday this week was accompanied by an order that Deloitte partners David Mansfield and Robert Woods be appointed as liquidators.

How the Deloitte duo came on the scene is also open to speculation. Scott Clout of David Clout & Associates, provided a consent to act as liquidator on behalf of Hong Kong-based secured creditor Becl Strategy Holdings Ltd (Becl) on April 28.

Gateway Group’s external administration was conceived when City of Parramatta Council slapped the Group with a statutory demand for more than $3.6 million and then filed a notice of court action relating to winding up on February 7, 2023.

At some point Becl bought the Council’s debt and a hearing of the winding up application on April 13 was adjourned to May 2 and then to Monday this week when the company was wound up.

So what will Mansfield and Woods make of this mess? Apparently Fayad declared in his ROCAP that the company owns real property to the value of $62,984,444 located at 83 Church Street, Parramatta NSW 2150 and 44 Early Street, Parramatta NSW 2150.

The Balance Sheet also records that 36 percent of this property was transferred from Gateway Parramatta One Pty Ltd to Gateway Parramatta One Commercial Pty Ltd.

However a search of the New South Wales Land Titles database for 83 Church Street records that JQZ Seventeen Pty Ltd is the registered owner of the property, with a PEXA settlement completion record disclosing that the property was sold for $85,497,710 on March 28, 2023, approximately a week before Albarran and Vouris’s appointment.

Sure enough Fayad also disclosed in his ROCAP that the Company has one outstanding debtor. JQZ Seventeen ATF the JQZ Seventeen Unit Trust.

JQZ Seventeen is controlled by Chinese-born billionaire developer Jian Qiu Zhang, who will be familiar to Sydney Morning Herald readers in respect of his 2020 Land & Environment Court battle with his Vaucluse neighbour over a hedge of Leyland cypress. Fun times await.