Top pastry chef for renowned Brisbane restaurateur battles for superannuation payments

A pastry chef who worked for one of Brisbane’s most prominent restaurateurs has just learned she never received her superannuation payments a year before the company was liquidated.

NOT SO SUPER

A pastry chef who worked for one of Brisbane’s most prominent restaurateurs has just learned she never received her superannuation payments and, to make matters worse, the ATO has washed its hands of the matter.

Amy De Graaf spent a year toiling at the renowned e’cco bistro in the CBD until December 2017, when operator Philip Johnson (illustrated) closed the venue ahead of his move to a new location under the same banner in Newstead.

De Graaf says she reached out to Johnson’s partner, Mary Randles, to sort out the matter because she handled some of the bookkeeping but never received a response.

This week she showed City Beat copies of her pay slips for the $55,000-a-year job which clearly indicate super contributions of between $80 and $100 each week.

Philip Johnson and Mary Randles

But De Graaf’s annual Intrust super statements, also sighted by your diarist, reveal no money received from Johnson’s now-defunct trading company M and P 100 Pty Ltd, where he was sole director and owner.

De Graaf, who currently works for Credit Corp, complained to the ATO but last month received a letter saying the agency had closed its investigation because M and P 100 had gone bust.

Johnson tipped the company into liquidation in January 2018 after suffering losses of $204,000 in the previous two financial years.

That was about a month after he paid $23,810 to acquire some of e’cco’s restaurant equipment, a vehicle and intellectual property and then transferred them to his intact company, Gulf 917 Pty Ltd, according a report by liquidator Anne-Marie Barley.

She found M and P 100 owed $17,874 for super and other priority claims, as well as $67,522 to nine other unsecured creditors at the time of its demise.

“The director (Johnson) noted … that the company did not regularly remit superannuation to the ATO and the company also has an outstanding running balance account (of $41,579),’’ Barley wrote in her report.

“It is my opinion that the company may have traded whilst insolvent from as early as August 2017.’’

But there’s still a glimmer of hope for De Graaf.

Amy De Graaf

Barley told us that she is currently seeking to recover $109,677 that Johnson paid to the ATO as a “voidable transaction’’. If she claws that money back, De Graaf will finally get her super.

Neither Johnson nor Randles returned calls seeking comment yesterday.

NO TEARS

Speaking of tax, Queensland’s Commissioner of State Revenue is calling it quits after five years in the job.

But members of the property industry are not shedding any tears at the imminent departure of Elizabeth Goli, who steps down on July 5.

Goli’s exit will cap a 35-year career that saw her spend plenty of time with the ATO and even enjoy a two-year posting in Paris with the OECD.

Critics, though, slammed her handling of the state’s controversial “absentee land tax,’’ which imposed a 1.5 per cent levy on those living overseas if their property was valued at $350,000 or more.

Queensland Shadow Treasurer Tim Mander

It was bumped up to 2 per cent in this month’s budget but the definition of “absentee’’ was tweaked so it did not hit Australian citizens and permanent residents.

Just last week in Parliament, Shadow Treasurer Tim Mander accused Treasurer Jackie Trad of initially bungling the wording but he later withdrew the charge.

He did, however, get Trad to acknowledge that there was no provision for a refund to those previously caught up in the dragnet.

A City Beat spy in the property game criticised the policy formation as “very sloppy’’ and the department’s attitude as “very obstructionist’’.

“Until they corrected it, it only caught a lot of Australian citizens who owned a couple of properties in Queensland who might have been living overseas briefly,’’ he said.

“Despite industry’s best efforts to explain what was wrong with it, there was always a ‘we know best’ mentality.’’

Philip Johnson, one of Brisbane’s most successful restaurateurs, will relocate after failing to strike a rent deal with landlord Nick Malouf