The Short Goodbye by Wynhausen Elisabeth;

Author:Wynhausen, Elisabeth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2011-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

The Corporate

Undertaker Digs In

They ended up owing him a quarter of a million dollars, but Bert van der Broek was going to the meeting of creditors of Waratah Engineering in Newcastle to ask the managing director to get up and apologise for being so reckless with other people’s money. The company had gone into administration owing everyone from the small local firms that supplied paper towels, to the distributors of the electric motors and hydraulics used in its mining machinery. Some unsecured creditors had already tried getting their hands on the stuff, storming up to the front gates in the Newcastle suburb of Argenton as soon as they heard Waratah was in the death grip of the administrators. It was too late. The gates had been locked. By the time creditors filed into the Macquarie Club, across the street from the Waratah factory, a few weeks later, most knew they would be lucky to see a cent.

Members of Waratah Engineering’s social club had feasted on their Christmas prawns at the Macquarie Club the previous December, some singing along a bit as they listened to rock classics like The Eagles’ ‘Take It Easy’ and AC DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ being belted out by Jemal Harbag, one of the boilermakers from over the road. But on that unseasonably warm morning in August 2009, the wooden shutters in the club’s auditorium were closed and the atmosphere was heavy enough to cut with a knife. The trio seated in front of the empty stage were from KordaMentha, the insolvency firm appointed by the Waratah directors. KordaMentha had just made its first million in ‘adviser service fees’ from the carcass of Storm Financial, according to the Courier Mail.1 The insolvency firm would make off like a bandit whether Waratah Engineering went into liquidation (to be stripped down like one of its shuttle cars, and sent back to the factory for ‘re-work’) or was sold to another firm; inevitably creditors asked if a little would come their way. People were talking about all the millions owed, but a couple of hundred thousand could send him broke, said one local supplier. And they had to pay their creditors, said another.

‘The one thing everyone needed to be aware of was that she was obligated to deal with claims in a certain order,’ said Janna Robertson, one of the administrators from KordaMentha, a cool, capable blonde with an armoury of management patter. ‘It’s a process we have to work through’, she told one creditor. ‘I haven’t formed a view on that’, she said a few minutes later, failing to mollify an irate supplier who said he had driven his ute up to the plant to get what was rightfully his. In every other respect it was a common story, and its heartaches, lost hopes and broken dreams were then being repeated an average of twenty-nine times a day; something worth thinking about when those people who saw a quid or a vote in it carried on about the recession we never had.

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