Deceased liquidator’s estate in sights of KPMG duo

It’s almost three years since Federal Court judge Angus Stewart made orders cancelling the liquidator’s registration of David Nicholas Iannuzzi.

Since that time the liquidators charged with undertaking the work that Iannuzzi didn’t have been investigating, gathering evidence, settling claims where they could and commencing proceedings where they couldn’t.

Those claims now on foot, which involve actions in respect of either voidable transactions or professional negligence, are about two thirds of the way to hearing in the NSW Supreme Court, or at least they were.

Late last month an interlocutory application was filed in the Federal Court of Australia (FCA) by John Tabuso, Mirjana Tabuso and Maurizio Ligori, three of the defendants in the Supreme Court actions commenced in 2021 by KPMG duo Stephen Vaughan and Gayle Dickerson.

As previously reported by iNO, when the Commissioner of Taxation (CoT) went after Iannuzzi seeking to expunge him from the roll of registered liquidators he also sought orders for the reinstatement of a host of corporate entities wound up and de-registered years earlier by Iannuzzi and his mentor Murray Godfrey who died in 2015.

Those orders were granted on September 2, 2019 and because of the time that had elapsed between the deregistrations and the CoT’s application for reinstatement and the appointment of Vaughan and Dickerson, Justice Stewart used certain powers, which he referred to in orders 3 and 4.

“3. Pursuant to section 601AH(3)(d) of the Act, when calculating the period ending three years after the relation-back day for any of the Companies, the period between the date of the deregistration of the relevant company and the date of these orders shall be disregarded.

“4. Pursuant to section 601AH(3)(d) of the Act, if proceedings are commenced by Ms Dickerson and Mr Vaughan as the joint and several liquidators of any of the Companies in reliance upon Order 3, Ms Dickerson and Mr Vaughan must cause a copy of these Orders to be served upon the defendant with the initiating process by which the proceedings are commenced and the defendant shall thereafter be at liberty to apply to this Court to vary or discharge Order 3 in relation to itself,” Justice Stewart said.

For reasons known best to themselves, John and Mirjana Tabuso and Maurizio Ligori waited three years to utilise the liberty afforded them by Justice Stewart in order four before attempting to extract themselves from unfair preference proceedings Vaughan and Dickerson have commenced against them.

Lawyer for the applicants Christine Perry of Pure Legal said yesterday that she’d had significant difficulty getting information from Justice Stewart and his staff because her clients were never parties to the proceedings.

She said the Supreme Court claims being brought against her clients for unfair preferences shouldn’t proceed because the payments, some of which she said go back to 2010, were mostly for wages.

Their interlocutory application in the FCA however creates a serious potential headache for the CoT given that if successful, it could derail other litigation being pursued or funded by the CoT that’s aimed at penalising beneficiaries of the tax avoidance schemes offered to clients of the notorious Banq Accountants.

iNO does not suggest that the applicants in the FCA proceedings were knowingly involved in the schemes.

As iNO has previously reported, Godfrey and Iannuzzi received voluminous referrals from Banq and when the interlocutory came before FCA judge Brigitte Markovic yesterday, it emerged that Dickerson and Vaughan are also seeking to make recoveries from Godfrey’s estate, with a lawyer appearing on behalf of his widow as executrix of his estate. But until the issue around Justice Stewart’s orders are resolved, those proceedings are likely to be put on ice.

The matter returns to court on November 18, 2022.