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…
It was one of those rare instances when the application of a proportionality percentage aligned with the fees that liquidators had calculated using their own hourly rates. But as often happens with opportune outcomes, special circumstances held sway. First and foremost was the nature of this liquidation. There were two entities, neither insolvent. One had no directors. The other had directors who were siblings and “deadlocked”….
If it had a spare moment to reflect, the spectre of proportionality would realise Justice Paul Brereton isn’t the only judge it has to thank for the frequency of its invocation. Another recent invokor is the NSW Supreme Court’s Justice Stephen Robb, who last week summoned the liquidator-terrorising shade to cloud the fortunes of David Clout. In the matter: David Lewis Clout in his capacity as Liquidator of Mainz…
Some might have missed the remarks of Federal Court Justice Michael Wigney recently, which seemed to convey less than complete satisfaction with Richard Stone’s remuneration after the RSM partner made application for special leave to distribute a surplus generated from the winding up of Goldana Investments. Specifically, the judge seemed concerned about the level of fees when set against the seemingly straightforward nature of the job….