Retired dVT Group co-founder Anton de Vries dVT Group co-founder Riad Tayeh Things have gotten very real this week with lawyers for the liquidators of Timbercorp filing bankruptcy proceedings in the Federal Court against Anton de Vries and Riad Tayeh. As well as being the subject of claims for almost $5 million in relation to loans the pair obtained back in 2006 as part of…
Jones Partners’ Michael Jones. A prominent Sydney trustee is defending an application for a conduct inquiry brought by a bankrupt who claims the trustee concealed from creditors his knowledge of more than $500,000 in a Westpac Bank account. The application – brought in the Federal Court by ex-Payless Entertainment CEO Mark Andrew Hurdis of Neutral Bay – alleges deceit and misconduct by the trustee in…
BPS Recovery’s Dave Sampson. KPMG’s Max Donnelly. Bungling by the Australian Financial Security Authority (AFSA) has forced two bankruptcy trustees to court in a bid to restore estates to their rightful appointees. Later today the Federal Court will hear an application by KPMG bankruptcy veteran Max Donnelly for declarations that he is the trustee in bankruptcy of the estate of Jason Maurie Nowytarger but not…
McGrathNicol’s Rob Kirman. McGrathNicol’s Rob Brauer. Questions of priority of entitlement to trust assets continue to vex even the most unflappable of insolvency practitioners and as a recent court judgment shows, even judicial eminences are wary of conclusive excess. In the matter of Francis (Trustee), in the matter of Fotios (Bankrupt) v Helios Corporation Pty Ltd [2022] FCA 199 Federal Court judge Craig Colvin explains…
CRS Warner principal Anthony Warner Sydney trustee Anthony Warner must be sitting on an estate flush with funds or is backed by a reliably liquid indemnifier after an appeals court deprived him of a nugget of residential gold and ordered him to pay the appellant’s costs of both the primary and appeal proceedings. iNO’s mail is that combined expenses could exceed $600,000. If Warner locked…
Being stung with an order to pay opponents’ costs can’t ever feel good but when the upside is orders freezing almost $6 million in proceeds from the sale of a property in the gracefully decaying suburb of Woollahra in inner Sydney then maybe it’s a shot of venom any trustee would bare their arm for. “The Bankruptcy Trustee did not on the interlocutory applications seek to establish, by evidence and…
Telling an insolvency practitioner their application for additional remuneration is “misconceived” is like telling Bill Shorten his plan for getting the ALP into power would work if only the plan’s primary beneficiary wasn’t himself. Red rags ain’t in it. So when an eminence of the Federal Circuit Court in Tasmania told trustee Brett Harrison that his application for a modest sum of future additional remuneration…
You’d think that engineering 100 cents in the dollar for creditors plus a surplus might get you a little leeway when it comes to a remuneration determination for an extra $10k but as Brett Harrison recently discovered, that’d be no. The Hobart-based trustee in bankruptcy, having completed all relevant tasks in respect of the estate of one Marianne Rose Beck, went to the Federal Circuit…
Deloitte partner Robert Woods. Cor Cordis partner Daniel Juratowitch. iNO has rarely read a decision where so many irregularities have been forgiven on the way to ruling in favour of an appellant seeking to terminate a winding up. Yet in Re The Thoroughbred Consultants Pty Ltd [2021] VSC 627 we have detailed reasons why Supreme Court of Victoria judge Michael Osborne decided that a winding…
A potentially prestigious and professionally rewarding bankruptcy appointment could be imminent after the Federal Court published details of freezing orders in respect of claims totalling almost $110 million being pursued by the Deputy Commissioner of Taxation (DCoT) against Queensland property developer James Raptis. Raptis, who is Queensland’s honorary consul for Greece, was one of the state’s biggest property developers until the 2009 global credit crunch…