Hall Chadwick’s Richard Lawrence. Hall Chadwick’s Richard Albarran. A liquidators’ remuneration application lodged in the Supreme Court of Victoria is being opposed by The Australian Tax Office (ATO) on the basis that much of the work should have been performed by more junior staff. In an 82 page affidavit dated December 21, 2022 ATO senior insolvency advisor Gary Busby outlines six grounds of objection to…
Chris Baskerville of Jirsch Sutherland. Insolvency practitioners need to be a thick-skinned and philosophical lot. Resentful creditors, regulators inclined to scape goat and duplicitous directors make for a generally adversarial stakeholder group that’s all too eager to pillory appointees at the merest whiff of an oversight. It’s no profession for those who need to be loved and when a practitioner cops a kicking they need…
Hall Chadwick WA partner Cameron Shaw. HLB Mann Judd WA principal Kim Wallman. Cameron Shaw and Richard Albarran have been ordered to pay a rival liquidator’s costs but avoided having to pay them personally after they unsuccessfully sought to have a special purpose liquidator (SPL) appointed to Perth Fashion Council WA (In Liquidation) (PFCWA). “The function of a costs order is not simply to ‘reward’…
McGrathNicol’s Rob Kirman. McGrathNicol’s Jamie Harris. While the law around how insolvency practitioners deal with trust assets has evolved exponentially in recent years, circumstances peculiar to a particular appointment can still confound appointees’ aims when it comes to asset pursuit, as Jamie Harris and Rob Kirman know very well. “Without determining the question, I would make the point that if an application to be appointed…
CRS Warner principal Anthony Warner Insolvency Experts’ principal Steve Kugel. The bitter struggle over a failed partnership that’s pitted two liquidators against each other for seven years is about to go to trial. But based on comments yesterday to the respective antagonists’ lawyers, the judge who’s hearing the matter is thinking beyond case management and conclaves. “There will have to be something done in respect…
Hall Chadwick’s Richard Lawrence. Hall Chadwick’s Richard Albarran. As iNO reported back in July, Hall Chadwick partners Richard Albarran and Richard Lawrence are determined to be paid for the work they did on the tempestuous Tauro Capital administration before creditors replaced them in October 2020. At the time iNO speculated that some creditors at least might be just as determined to deny them. We can…
The late Murray Godfrey. Ex-liquidator David Iannuzzi. It’s almost three years since Federal Court judge Angus Stewart made orders cancelling the liquidator’s registration of David Nicholas Iannuzzi. Since that time the liquidators charged with undertaking the work that Iannuzzi didn’t have been investigating, gathering evidence, settling claims where they could and commencing proceedings where they couldn’t. Those claims now on foot, which involve actions in…
KPMG’s Matthew Woods. It must be some relief to liquidators to know that they can overlook notifying an insolvent company’s directors about applying to extend the three-year legal deadline to bring preference actions and there’s no blowback. Well, not for the liquidators at least. “The plaintiffs concede the directors should have been notified of the original application. They accept it was an oversight on their…
Mackay Goodwin’s Mitchell Ball. The Court of Appeal has with one hand given to Sydney liquidator Mitchell Ball and with the other hand denied him. In an extensive judgment delivered yesterday, NSW Supreme Court of Appeal judges Fabian Gleeson, Mark Leeming and Anna Mitchelmore rejected Ball’s submissions that primary judge Julie Ward erred last year when she found that Ivana Cassaniti, wife of alleged carousel…
Morton + Lee Insolvency’s Gavin Morton. No practitioner likes being replaced just when the labour of administration looks set to moderate courtesy of a deed proposal but unsecureds can be restive beasts, particularly when they are the ATO. Last month it was the turn of Queensland liquidator Gavin Morton to test the Commonwealth debt collector’s patience in relation to a Deed of Company Arrangement (DoCA)…