Pitcher Partners’ Paul Weston. Pitcher Partners partner Paul Weston has gained some useful intel in regards to disclosure and examination summonses for those playing their trade in the personal insolvency space, though not without cost. This week the Federal Court agreed with a former bankrupt and his wife that examination summonses requiring them to attend the court for questioning should be set aside on the…
Veritas Advisory’s David Iannuzzi. Despite various decisions in its favour, including most recently in February before the Federal Court of Appeal, the Commissioner of Taxation (CoT) has even now, more than 18 months after this action was commenced, yet to fully secure its bid for an inquiry into the conduct of Sydney liquidator, David Iannuzzi. Observers of this slow march to uncertainty would be forgiven…
Attributing guilt by association is an avoidable injustice (unless justified) which is why INO declares at first instance that not one of the five liquidators named this week in the Federal Court are alleged to have done anything wrong. The five – Richard Rohrt, Glenn Crisp, Malcolm Howell, Travis Pullen and Andrew Poulter – were identified during the course of the public examination of Melbourne man Phil…
Word is that De Jonge Read director Ashley Shield may have spent some time in the witness box this week during examinations into the affairs of Trigger Holdings Pty Ltd. Details are sketchy with the courts refusing to release details and Trigger’s liquidators clamming up when INO called seeking specifics. What we do know is that a director and a former director of the company were…
FTI Consulting’s Joanne Dunn has been supplanted by a special purpose liquidator (SPL) after the Commonwealth’s FEG Recovery Unit decided it wanted someone else to investigate possible phoenix transactions involving companies within the Intelara Group (Intelara). Last week in the Federal Court Justice Roger Derrington heard that FEG wanted Perth-based practitioner Jack James appointed SPL of a company known only by its Australian Company Number –…
Balance Insolvency’s Tim Cook spent a couple of hours in the witness box in the NSW Supreme Court yesterday, contributing as best as he could to the proceedings currently underway in the matter of Fearndale Holdings. Cook is Fearndale’s most recent external administrator, having been appointed as voluntary administrator (VA) back on May 3 of this year. We missed the bulk of his testimony but did…
Liquidator Michael Caspaney may soon head to court to have a funding agreement with FEG ratified after creditors of Queensland construction firm Cullen Group Australia rejected the deal on the basis it would bankroll pursuit of sub-contractors who had received more than $4 million in preference payments. Readers of Insolvency News Online may recall that Caspaney was installed at the first meeting of creditors back…
Correction & Clarification Glenn Crisp has been mentioned a second time during public examinations being run by Pitcher Partners Andrew Yeo and Gess Rambaldi as they investigate a $100 million tax-avoidance and phoenix-facilitation racket allegedly masterminded by Melbourne man Phil Whiteman. For the record the Jirsch Sutherland Victoria managing partner is not accused of any wrongdoing and Crisp is one of approximately 100 registered liquidators Australia-wide who accepted…
Trading on a business under a license agreement would seem to be a perfectly normal proposition for insolvency practitioners extracting the last vestiges of value from a failing company but the agreement entered into by Veritas Advisory’s David Iannuzzi and Steve Naidenov as administrators of the MK Floors Group could not be described as normal. For a start, the licensee was a company called Chiswick which is…
When you’re conducting what might be the largest and most complex public examination ever run by Australian liquidators, maintaining the process without inadvertently creating additional complexity can be challenging, as Pitcher Partners’ Andrew Yeo and Gess Rambaldi have discovered after being dragged into a potential defamation action between one of the examinees and Fairfax Media’s The Age newspaper. On August 28 Tim Batchelor, a locksmith…