Creditors

ATO attacks liquidators’ fee bid on multiple fronts

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…


Jirsch punted as Westpac declares preference

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 duo dodge personal costs order

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’…


Battle over boat leaves Baskerville to foot bill

Chris Baskerville of Jirsch Sutherland. Bailments. Security interests. Deeds of settlement and insolvency. It’s a formula liquidator Chris Baskerville has found can leave a bitter aftertaste. So good luck to those currently coming before Labor senator Deb O’Neill and others of her species as they hear submissions as part of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services review of Corporate Insolvency in Australia….


Queensland receiver fighting bid for judicial inquiry

Marcus Watters of Hall Chadwick. Hall Chadwick partner Marcus Watters is seeking to fend off an application for a judicial inquiry into his conduct of the sale process for the Carvers Reach development in Queensland. Court documents reveal that plaintiffs CIP Group, CIP 1 Pyrmont Portfolio and Marc Clancy are seeking orders for an inquiry into various “acts and omissions” they allege were perpetrated by…


RegLiq drops fee claim, contributory abandons review

Mackay Goodwin’s Mitchell Ball. Mitchell Ball has chosen to abandon a final remuneration claim in the winding up of Speedy Ventilation Pty Ltd (Speedy) after a contributory asked the court to scrutinise the Mackay Goodwin director’s fees going back as far as 2016. “Mr Ball’s application for additional remuneration had the difficulty that, on any view, the remuneration claimed was large by reference to the…


Pub proceeds in limbo as SPL appointment looms

Wexted Advisors founder and principal Joe Hayes. Wexted Advisors partner Andrew McCabe. Reaping almost $130 million from the sale of public houses looks like an exceptional result for a pair of Sydney receivers but a decision to affirm a director’s unit trust holding could see distribution of the profits disrupted by a Special Purpose Liquidator (SPL). Since December 2021 when they were appointed receiver managers…


Never sell to the major shareholder’s rival

BRI Ferrier’s David Coyne. Former Barokes liquidator James Koutsoukos. A judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria has cracked a can of hurt after approving an application by a creditor to bring proceedings in the name of the company against the company’s liquidators. Whilst ruling that the creditor must agree to indemnify the company in liquidation again any adverse costs, Justice Richard Attiwill found that…


Deed administrators block pub group dividend

Wexted Advisors partner Andrew McCabe. Wexted Advisors founder and principal Joe Hayes. Lavishing creditors with a fat dividend on the eve of the festive season is no doubt an aspiration close to the heart of every insolvency practitioner, so one can imagine the distinctly unChristmas-like sentiments that must have echoed through the Pitt Street offices of Wexted Advisors early Monday morning. Unwelcome correspondence had arrived…


Neither consenting nor objecting doesn’t always fly

Being non-committal can get a liquidator a long way. After all, far from sitting on the fence, neither consenting or objecting can show that the external administrator is prudently preserving powder in circumstances where there may be no fight to have. But neutrality only gets you so far unless you’re Swiss, and when tricky and contested questions around the proceeds of asset dispersals emerge, the…