It’s no great stretch to imagine that the biggest creditor in the nation might also be the biggest beneficiary of preferences, irrespective of the fact that Australia’s biggest creditor knocks off each day nine minutes earlier than the average clock watcher. What’s that about? Beating the afternoon rush? For insolvency practitioners, tackling the Australian Tax Office (ATO) over preferences can be fraught. Like any other…
BPS Recovery’s Max Prentice has dodged a major blow in the Federal Court, with a judge yesterday ordering he pay 70 per cent of the costs of a creditor who challenged his handling of a meeting of creditors of former bankrupt and struck off solicitor Robert Coshott but declining to make an order that Prentice be precluded from utilising his right to be indemnified for those costs…
On December 19 last year the industrious litigators heading the Fair Entitlements Guarantee (FEG) Recovery Program got the two things they must’ve wanted most. A Commonwealth decree declaring their pilot program permanent, and more funding. At around the same time, a number of liquidators received correspondence from the FEG Recovery team. Apparently the letters – authored SiN understands by Arnold Bloch Leibler – requested that…
Bankruptcy trustee Max Prentice might have more to smile about than usual this Christmas after long time nemesis Fewin Pty Ltd and members of the associated Coshott family abandoned their action against the BPS Recovery partner and against ex-trustee in bankruptcy John Burke in the Federal Court. On Tuesday Fewin Pty Ltd, Ljiljana Coshott, and her husband Robert Gilbert Coshott were granted leave to discontinue proceedings which had been the…
Billing $1 million a week in remuneration suggests a truly frenetic degree of activity has attended KordaMentha’s attempts to rescue stricken steel maker Arrium. Either that, or salaries offered to lure sufficient quantities of number crunchers to handle this complex and politically fraught appointment are at the top of the range or, given the fact the initial team has since contracted substantially, the appointees themselves…
Meanwhile in Victoria, the Supreme Court has tossed up a lengthy judgment cataloging the continuing efforts of Hall Chadwick’s David Ross and Richard Albarran to secure more than $200,000 in fees and expenses they argue have been owing since 2012. In Ross v Gippsreal [2016] VSC 753, the Hall Chadwick pair claim they are owed the money by their appointor, Gippsreal in respect of fees…
Electronic communications are like confetti – uncontrollable once released – and it didn’t take long before details from yesterday’s meeting between ASIC, Treasury and ARITA to began appearing in SiN’s inbox. The meeting was arranged to discuss the controversial liquidators’ levy. To recoup the $9 million per annum ASIC says it spends regulating registered liquidators, the regulator has proposed that practitioners pay a fee of…
Would it be more costly to allow insolvent companies like Octaviar to collapse chaotically? SiN asks in jest. The alternative to a controlled winding up administered by justice cannot be tolerated. But it would be a wonderfully instructive experiment, fatalities aside. The catalyst for contemplating such improbabilities was the release yesterday of the six monthly accounts for Octaviar Administration (OA), which has been under the…
Justice Paul Brereton has taken a persuasively-argued blade to a pay claim by Chris Darin and Simon Cathro of Worrells for remuneration as liquidators of Dungowan Manly Pty Ltd. The pair asked for $42,761.00 to be fixed by court order after the members of Dungowan Manly refused to endorse the pay claim when it was put to them via resolution on May 23 this year. In his…
With the insolvency profession atremble at the prospect of proportionality, the news that HLB Mann Judd’s Barry Taylor and Andrew Needham have had a tad shy of $542,000 in remuneration approved by a court must be reassuring. On Wednesday the Supreme Court of NSW’s Justice Ashley Black handed down his decision In the matter of Idyllic Solutions Pty Ltd as trustee for Super Save Superannuation Fund and…