OPINION Less than 10 per cent of registered liquidators (RegLiqs) are female according to the latest ASIC data, suggesting initiatives aimed at increasing the proportion of female insolvency practitioners seeking and attaining registration are either inefficient or misguided. The Regulator’s latest Insolvency Statistics series, published in January 2022, shows there were 589 male RegLiqs domiciled in Australia and 57 female RegLiqs in the year 2020…
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…
After seeing the number of appointments being relinquished by Queensland-based liquidator and trustee Brendan Nixon, iNO can but wonder wonder at the depth of cosiness which must exist between SM Solvency Accountants‘ owner Jarrod Sierocki and at least some of the equity parters at Vincents. As revealed by documents lodged by Nixon’s lawyers in the Federal Court, all told the Vincents trio of Nick Combis,…
Hall Chadwick partner Kathleen Vouris. Hall Chadwick’s Richard Albarran. It’s not often that a pair of administrators seek the court’s approval to extend a convening period with the excuse that they’re waiting for a foreign government to stump up a deed contribution that’ll make all debts disappear. Hall Chadwick partners Richard Albarran and Kathleen Vouris however can lay claim to this rare distinction. As administrators…
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…
Worrells’ Christopher Darin. Hall Chadwick partner Kathleen Vouris. Worrells Chris Darin and Hall Chadwick’s Kathleen Vouris and Richard Albarran are at odds over documents and dealings relating to world war two (WWII) battlefields in the Solomon Islands part-owned by Australian companies Orbis Commodities Pty Limited (Orbis) and Pacific Investment Holding Pty Limited (PIH). “although the adjournment sought is unusually long, I accept that decision-making may…
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…
KPMG’s Matthew Woods There’s a line between acceptable levels of risk taking on behalf of creditors and forcing one’s hand in pursuit of fees, and as Federal Court judge Darren Jackson recently explained, material distinctions in respect of indemnities when things go south. Or in this case west, where those material differences came to the fore when KPMG’s Perth-based head honcho of restructuring Matt Woods…