Cor Cordis duo Rahul Goyal and Kate Conneely wanted out. They couldn’t locate the asset. Their funder was happy for them to go. All that was required was a judge prepared to approve their final remuneration and ahem, disbursements. What they got was Ashley Black.
The scrupulously correct Corporations List judge at the NSW Supreme Court on Monday heard Goyal and Conneely’s application for approval of their retirement as liquidators of Silent Yachts Australia Pty Ltd (SYA) and had no problem with it.
Nor did the judge flinch when asked to approve their remuneration.
But when it came to making an order approving payment of the retiring liquidators’ disbursements his honour baulked.
It wasn’t that the disbursements were outlandishly excessive. But this judge wasn’t going to allow the court to be used for what he viewed as an unnecessary purpose.
“Where it’s a matter of a right of indemnity at the discretion of the liquidators there’s no reason for the court to approve the payment where there is no controversy about them,” the judge said in declining to order that the disbursements be paid.
Did Goyal and Conneely’s lawyers not realise who they were dealing with?
His honour was well aware that the pair had initially been funded by SYA’s secured creditor Innovation Structured Finance Co., LLC (ISFC), which first appointed them as receivers in 2022 when they were with KordaMentha.
Run out of New York-based hedge fund Brevet Capital Management, ISFC partners with local outfit Radium Capital.
Perth head-quartered Radium advances funds in anticipation of borrowers qualifying for research & development (R&D) tax refunds.
Clearly that didn’t happen in the case of SYA. In their most recent report to creditors – now almost 18 months old – Goyal and Conneely identified one significant unsecured creditor. The ATO, owed $532,000.
What the pair also identified was what looks like an uncommercial transaction, with the yacht having been transferred to a related entity for nil consideration. But the director had provided no RoCAP and another director purportedly based in /Thailand could not be located to be served.
The court heard on Monday that barring any objections, the job would be returning to KordaMentha, with ISFC apparently happy to bankroll Scott Langdon and Ryan Rabbitt as replacement liquidators.
Presumably the judge expected that the outgoing and incoming insolvency practitioners could and should work out the disbursements issue between themselves and that petitioning the court to commandeer that process was neither efficient nor desirable.
Black was correct