Removing an incumbent liquidator is a high hurdle but Sydney accountant Rose Guerin is having a crack, seemingly compelled by the toxicity of her relationship with Kennedy Ryan’s Richard Rohrt, liquidator of her failed accounting firm, Rose Guerin and Partners Pty Ltd.
In the Federal Court yesterday, Guerin’s counsel told judge Roger Derrington that his client would argue that Rohrt should be removed for overcharging, for delaying convening a meeting of creditors at which Guerin propounded a DoCA proposal and because of his conduct when attending the accounting firm’s premises to seize books and records.
“Mr Rohrt did not act appropriately to put it mildly,” barrister Hugh Somerville said in submissions without specifying what Rohrt was meant to have said or done that allegedly qualifies as inappropriate conduct.
iNO has already reported on the issue of Rohrt’s fees, which were the subject of a highly critical judgment delivered in 2021 by Federal Court judge Stewart Anderson.
In Rohrt, in the matter of Rose Guerin and Partners Pty Ltd (in liq) v Princes Square W24NY Pty Ltd (No 2) [2021] FCA 547 his honour was moved to say: “Having reviewed that evidence, I had serious concerns about the scale of those costs”.
Guerin however has her own issues on the dollars and cents front, given her failure to come up with the readies necessary to satisfy the terms of the deed of company arrangement she’d pushed so hard for.
Somerville told the judge yesterday that her failure to satisfy the deed terms was a direct result of the costs she’d incurred trying to force Rohrt to call the meeting necessary so the company could be placed into voluntary administration as a prelude to creditors voting on Guerin’s DoCA proposal.
Rohrt’s lawyer Paolo Tatti of Aitken Partners however told the judge that the suggestion his client should have called the meeting much earlier couldn’t be allowed to stand, particularly in circumstances where Guerin had represented her ability to satisfy the deed terms.
“She couldn’t make the deed payment that 21 days earlier she said she could,” Tatti told the judge, who made orders in respect of deadlines for evidence and set down the matter for final hearing on May 13.
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