Perhaps we can take comfort when the views of the insolvency regulators are diametrically opposed to the views of experts in the industry and academe? After all, isn’t ensuring nobody is happy the secret to successful government? Such were the thoughts that occurred as SiN read the social media commentary issuing forth after September 1, the day the second and final tranche of the Insolvency…
The barrister defending controversial ex-liquidator Andrew Wily against ASIC’s call for a judicial inquiry didn’t hold back yesterday. “There’s an element of spite about this,” barrister Ian Jackman SC told presiding Judge Paul Brereton as he sought to undermine ASIC’s case. “They want public censure,” he said. Jackman’s allegation of a spite motivation was part of a bid to demonstrate why the regulator’s application for a…
Well litigation funder Doug Hayter has extracted himself from the debacle that is Young V Thomson (formerly trustee of the property of Young) [2017] FCAFC 140 but the same cannot quite be said for Veritas Advisory’s Louise Thomson, who will be forced to scrape together as much as a quarter of a million dollars from her own resources following last week’s judgment of the Federal Court…
A critical element of the Network TEN – CBS transaction being engineered by voluntary administrators (VAs) KordaMentha looks set to be challenged, a court heard this week. On Thursday, barrister Ian Jackman told Justice Brigitte Markovic that “other parties are likely to appear and may well oppose” the application by the VAs to transfer shares controlled by TEN’s three billionaire shareholders to the American entertainment behemoth. Might two of the three – Lachlan Murdoch and…
When the planets align, the wind blows fair and the detail is both accurate and abundant, the dispensers of justice are happy to approve liquidator remuneration claims on the basis of hourly rates without recourse to the inherently fee-reductive principles of proportionality. In the latest instalment in the growing genre of judgments spawned by Sakr Nominees Pty Limited [2017] NSWSC 668 Ferrier Hodgson partner George Georges has…
It’s a big few days coming up for KordaMentha with some rapid leaps in the Ten administration possible following receiver PPB’s sale of the network to CBS and the official handover of Arrium taking place at week’s end. This afternoon lawyers for Mark Korda, Jenny Nettleton and Jarrod Villani are due to front the Federal Court in Sydney seeking approval to pay out the secured creditors of the Ten…
Ex-bankrupt Robert Coshott and his wife Ljiljana Coshott have failed in their attempts to challenge fees and remuneration payable to Nick Crouch and Shabnam Amirbeaggi, who were appointed trustees for the sale of a Bellevue Hill property held jointly by Mrs Coshott and her husband’s former trustee in bankruptcy, Max Prentice. Rubbing salt into the failure, the three judges of the Federal Court of Appeal ordered that…
Well it’s taken the corporate regulator a moment to catch up – a moment lasting 11 weeks and two days to be precise – but at last the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has confirmed what SiN flagged back on June 2 – Thea Eszenyi, formerly of the now defunct Adelaide office of McGrathNicol – is to be ASIC’s new cop on the liquidator…
There’s nothing like a howler in official government documentation – in this instance from the NSW Office of State Revenue – to disrupt the straightforward process of asset disposal, as Deloitte’s Neil Cussen learned in the curious case of Zerren Pty Ltd. Cussen was appointed liquidator of Zerren in June 2014 following an application by the Chief Commissioner of State Revenue to wind up the…
Stigma shmigma. Who said bankruptcy permanently stained a person with the irredeemable taint of debtor’s shame? SiN has come across a practitioner whose experience more than validates the redemptive power of personal insolvency. Last week Jirsch Sutherland announced that business director Rebecca Hindson had been appointed manager of the firm’s new Wollongong office. In a press release dated August 16 we learn that Hindson – an Illawarra local –…