After being told that he and not the court would need to decide whether the winding up of Mawson Infrastructure Group Inc (MIGI) should continue Cameron Gray has chosen the option least likely to provoke MIGI’s American interests into a nuclear response. The renewables option if you will.
Facing contempt proceedings in the US and a hostile board that’s impugned the validity of the orders appointing him, the Hamilton Murphy partner has applied in the Federal Court of Australia for orders terminating the liquidation.
That has created a novel issue for Federal Court judge Kylie Downes to resolve once the hearing concludes this afternoon.
This case illustrates like few others how external administrators can be caught between a rock and a hard place.
Gray was appointed after winding up orders were made in February 2025 by a Registrar of the Federal Court of Australia on the application of a creditor, W Capital Advisors.
But by the time of the winding up was order, MIGI had been in Chapter 11 in the US for some months and according to US law, entry into Chapter 11 imposed an immediate global moratorium preventing creditors from taking any action against the company or its subsidiaries. Ever since Gray’s conduct of the liquidation has been severely hampered.
In the eyes of at least some of MIGI’s directors his appointment was invalid. Given directors dislike relinquishing books and records at the best of times, Team USA wasn’t the slightest bit interested in supplying them to Gray. And with a US court order effectively invalidating his appointment they may well have been advised that they’d breach their fiduciary duties by doing so.
The hearing commenced yesterday. Why Gray has taken so long to seek to resolve the issue around the validity of his appointment is not something the judge has to address.
That’s unfortunate because exploring it might reveal more about the relationship between Gray and his funder, the petitioning creditor W Capital Advisors which placed itself into administration late last year around the same time that after MIGI emerged from Chapter 11 and began pursuing allegations of cabal and conspiracy against it and Gray.
What appears to have galvanised Gray into action is the US court’s decision to hear the contempt claim on July 8 but when the parties returned to court this morning for day two of the hearing two things became immediately clear.
Overnight it seemed MIGI’s US controllers expressed to their Australian representatives a preparedness to discontinue the contempt proceedings and having heard such this morning Justice Downes indicated she is open to terminating the winding up, once she’s received confirmation that the US proceedings have been discontinued. Her reasons should be illuminating.
Further reading:
Being an IP can be thankless