Blackstar Aviation boss Simon Waters faces a wind-up bid two years after his last firm crashed

A wind-up bid has been launched in court against a Queensland company whose founder is a bankrupt who presided over the failure of another aviation firm just two years ago.

Simon Waters, founder and director of Blackstar Aviation.

It looks like a bankrupt aviation industry player on the Gold Coast has encountered a fresh round of turbulence.

We learned on Tuesday that a wind-up bid has been launched in court against Skywings Aviation Pty Ltd, which trades as Blackstar Aviation.

The Southport-based business offers luxury private jet rentals to Hamilton, Hayman and Lizard islands, as well as charter getaways to horse racing and motorsport events around the country and across Asia.

Records show it was only launched last December by founder Simon Waters even though his LinkedIn page states, somewhat curiously, that he’s been the managing director of Blackstar since 2010.

In another odd twist, a 73-year-old gent living in the UK became his co-director in January.

But it gets even stranger.

Blackstar Aviation founder Simon Waters.

We’re still unclear how Waters could serve as a director since he remains an undischarged bankrupt following legal action taken by a law firm two years ago.

His bankruptcy started just two weeks after Kirkhope Aviation in Victoria won court orders in January 2019 to have a liquidator appointed over Stratus Aviation Group Pty Ltd, where Waters was the sole director and owner.

Kirkhope, an air charter outfit operating since 1974, claimed it had spent months chasing an $80,000 debt and even alleged it had received bogus remittance statements from the company.

Just weeks before the Stratus crash, Waters told other media he was “in the process of restructuring’’ and poised to resolve a dispute with a services provider.

Liquidator Alice Ruhe later determined that Stratus went down owing 13 unsecured creditors nearly $300,000 and there was no chance of them recovering any of the money.

That’s not all.

In a report to creditors, she alleged that Waters had made nearly $195,000 in “unfair preference payments” to 10 parties before everything went pear-shaped at the company, which traded for less than a year.

Ruhe also revealed a raft of “uncommercial transactions’’ after she found that Waters had paid himself $67,000 in the nine months before the business went bust.

“I have identified significant payments in respect to the director’s personal expenses, including the payment of rent in respect to his residence, personal credit cards, motor vehicle repairs, food and drink purchases and cash withdrawals from the company’s bank accounts,’’ she wrote.

In case all this wasn’t enough, records indicate that Waters previously operated now-defunct entities Lightspeed Aviation and Jetblue Aviation.

Waters, a 34-year-old native of Adelaide who claims to be a “corporate Gulfstream pilot,’’ did not return a call seeking comment Tuesday.

Peter Bond

STILL UNDETERRED

Greenies remain undeterred even though the Crown has dropped its case against Peter Bond and other former directors of failed Linc Energy.

They are still implacably opposed to an Arrow Energy plan to drill 286 new coal seam gas wells, some of which would be within a 10km radius of the Western Downs site contaminated by Linc’s botched underground coal gasification project.

The company, which collapsed five years ago owing more than $300m, was later fined $4.5m for the environmental damage and taxpayers forked out $31m to clean up the mess.

Lock The Gate Alliance operative Ellie Smith said Tuesday the dropped case “raises questions about ‘chain of responsibility’ laws in Queensland” aimed at keeping companies accountable.