Shaun Fraser.
Joe Hayes.
Wexted Advisors’ Joe Hayes has fought a gallant action in the NSW Supreme Court since being appointed administrator – along with colleague Chris Johnson – of the beleaguered mine operator Tahmoor Coal Pty Ltd on February 9, 2026.
Hayes got the unions on side, forced the deed administrators of Tahmoor’s shareholder Liberty Primary Metals Australia Pty Ltd (LPMA) to abandon their share sale campaign and persuaded NSW Supreme Court judge Ashley Black to adjourn the hearing of a winding up application commenced by Coal Mines Insurance Pty Ltd (CMI) in August last year.
But based on remarks made by Justice Black yesterday those powers of persuasion are labouring under a burden that will force Tahmoor into liquidation as soon as today if it can’t soon be shed, and that burden is the God awful uncertainty shrouding Hayes and Johnson’s mystery funder.
Lawyers for CMI are due back in court this morning to continue their efforts to have orders made for the winding up of the company and the appointment of a liquidator.
Hayes’ old colleague Shaun Fraser from McGrathNicol has provided a consent and even arranged funding from Alex Hone’s Keyview Financial, who in a previous incarnation had been a backer of Sanjeev Gupta, the man behind the mess that is the OneSteel Manufacturing Group (OMS) insolvency, of which Tahmoor and LPMA are part.
Since being appointed the VAs have covered the care and maintenance costs of the mine and the expenses of the administration using funding from a related entity, Clydesdale Engineering which is based in the UK.
Hayes has declared that Clydesdale will make $40 million available but has also admitted that he doesn’t know from what source that $40 million commitment is coming from because it isn’t Clydesdale, which reportedly has assets of $10 million.
Hayes has also declared that he is urgently seeking alternative funding from a source more acceptable to the court and his counsel David Sulan SC is likely to tell the court today that his client is perhaps a week away from securing it.
Yesterday Sulan asked the judge to consider adjourning for either eight weeks or three. Today he’s likely to request a week. And looming over it all is the judge’s concern about Gupta’s motives.
He told Sulan it defies commercial sense that Gupta would fund a VA to bring about the sale of Tahmoor if he knew the VAs would, in the course of selling Tahmoor, seek to preserve creditor rights in respect of uncommercial transactions, a reference to the monumental $354.8 million Gupta ripped out of Tahmoor to try and save OSM in 2024.
That loan was subsequently converted to a $427 million dividend which was paid not to Tahmoor but to LPMA.
If the judge today declines to further adjourn the hearing of the winding up application and Tahmoor is liquidated Hayes and Jonson’s part in the play will end and Fraser will take to the stage as the new sheriff in town equipped with bigger guns and an obvious target.
Meanwhile, the screaming you’ll hear in the event of liquidation will be coming from FEG, which will have to find more than $30 million to cover the entitlements of Tahmoor’s 250-odd employees who Fraser will have to immediately make redundant.
Further reading:
Deed administrator silent on Tahmoor Coal shares
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