Tim Beresford.
Tim Beresford’s loathing of overtly ungenerous personal insolvency agreements (PIA) has become common knowledge in the last two years, courtesy of two episodes of Trumpian-scale intervention.
The first came in 2024 when in an unprecedented move the Inspector-General in Bankruptcy (IGB) and AFSA CEO applied in the Federal Court to have the PIA of Brisbane lawyer Beau Hartnett set aside.
The application was brought not only against Hartnett but his controlling trustees SV Partners’ Anne Meagher and Adam Kersey who Beresford believed had shown insufficient curiosity in respect of the lawyer’s asset structuring arrangements before recommending creditors accept his laughable 2.7 cents in the dollar offer.
While the SV pair ultimately escaped sanction Hartnett’s piss take of a PIA was set aside and orders were made sequestering his estate.
In the wake of his success, Beresford next turned his laser focus on the PIA being proposed by failed hospitality baron and penthouse pauper Jon Adgemis.
If Hartnett’s bitter pill of a proposal was hard to swallow then Adgemis’s offer – 0.17 cents in the dollar on $1.8 billion of debt – was beyond the capacity of the most accommodating stomach.
Incensed, Beresford took aim at Adgemis’ controlling trustees Scott Pascoe and Ben Ho, going so far as to despatch an envoy to a meeting of creditors.
Once there the envoy issued the trustees with a formal Direction in respect of concerns Beresford and his investigators held regarding Pascoe and Ho’s investigations and the contents of their report to creditors.
The WLP Restructuring duo wisely adjourned the meeting and from that moment the PIA proposal was stuffed.
Soon afterwards ubiquitous creditor the ATO substituted in on the extant creditor’s petition proceedings and the Federal Court ordered Adgemis’s estate be sequestered in October last year.
All very commendable. The IGB is right to pursue such blatant attempts to corrupt the PIA process. But that makes it all the more difficult to understand why Beresford stood idly by in the case of Adgemis’s mate Howard Hao Ting Cao of Option Group.
An inveterate gambler and regular at Crown Sydney and Crown Melbourne casinos, Cao 47 was in debt to the tune of $130 million last year when he appointed Thyge Trafford Jones as his controlling trustee and proposed a PIA so miserly it makes Adgemis’ pittance look lavish.
Certainly Trafford-Jones was unenthusiastic, recommending that creditors reject the 0.0043 cents in the dollar or $300,000 in total satisfaction of $130 million in debts. And it wasn’t just the infinitesimal sum being offered that constituted an assault on the concept of what’s reasonable.
The $300,000 was also unsecured and to be paid by a person or persons about which all creditors knew was that they were domiciled in China.
Yet despite these repellant terms Beresford was nowhere to be seen. No delegate of the IGB crashed the meeting. No proceedings targeting the PIA were threatened.
The compromise was approved by a majority of creditors in number and value in May 2025 and it took several months before a creditor outraged by the offer’s unsurpassed offensiveness succeeded in having it set aside and Cao bankrupted.
Due to procedural oversight the file is with the Official Trustee, who wants to farm it out to Alan Ma and Anthony Bagala ofdVT McLeods. But that can’t happen until after Federal Court judge Melissa Perry delivers her decision on Cao’s application to review the decision to sequester his estate.
Her honour heard submissions from the parties this week and has reserved judgment, something Beresford also seems to have been content to do, despite Cao’s PIA more than qualifying for a dose of the IGB’s epic fury.
Further reading:
Trustees dodge bullet as suspect PIA set aside
Bank focusses on Vincents pair after PIA discharged
Adgemis: trustee asks right question of wrong person
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