Neil Summerson, Geoff McMahon and Scott Bryan win long-running legal battle over Palm Beach Developments Pty Ltd
Three seasoned Brisbane businessmen overseeing the orderly sell down of a property fund once valued at close to $1 billion have had a win in court, overcoming a nemesis that just this week had gone into administration.
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SCHADENFREUDE
Three seasoned Brisbane bizoids overseeing the orderly sell down of a property fund once valued at about $1bn got some good news recently.
Neil Summerson, Geoff McMahon and Scott Bryan, as directors of Australian Property Growth Limited, won a long-running legal battle which saw one of their subsidiaries recover $3 million that had been languishing in a lawyer’s trust account for years.
They will also no doubt indulge in a bit of schadenfreude this week as it emerged that their nemesis in court, mezzanine financier Palm Beach Developments Pty Ltd, had collapsed.
Palm Beach’s sole director, a 26-year-old Brazilian lad named Johnny Tanabe who only got the gig earlier this month, tipped the company into administration.
Chris Baskerville, from bean counters Jirsch Sutherland, has been tapped to clean up the mess but he didn’t respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. We couldn’t reach Tanabe either.
SAD CODA
It’s a sad coda for Palm Beach Developments, which partnered with APGL to develop the “Pavillions on 5th” project on the Gold Coast way back in 2005.
Plans called for a $110m mixed retail and residential development at Palm Bach but it was only partially completed, with a second stage coming unstuck by 2013.
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The two camps subsequently fell out over the issue of monetary advances made by APGL and how those payments should be treated in terms of development costs.
Supreme Court Justice Peter Flanagan eventually sided with APGL and ruled that they constituted loans, a position which was upheld on appeal earlier this year. He also dismissed a counterclaim.
APGL later sold the shopping centre for an estimated $26m loss in late 2017 to Don O’Rorke’s Consolidated Properties Group, which picked it up for just $10m.
Meanwhile, APGL is nearly done with the sell down of the Australian Property Growth Fund, which first started offloading assets in 2011. It once owned plenty of well-known sites, including the Blue Tower in the Brisbane CBD.
Summerson, a former chairman of Bank of Queensland and ex-state boss of Ernst & Young, first got the APGL gig in 2006. McMahon, a veteran property player, and Bryan (son of natural gas legend Bob Bryan) each came aboard two years before that.
LOW’N SLOW
Two Brisbane mates besotted with slow-cooked American barbecue are now poised to start selling their rubs and sauces in the US.
Drew Walliker and Gareth Dosser will shortly sign a licensing agreement to have their products manufactured in Vancouver and then distributed across North America.
It’s quite a feat for the pair, who won 5th place for their brisket at the American Royal World Series of Barbecue competition in 2018 that drew more than 600 competitors to Kansas City.
They’re convinced it was the snap-frozen Aussie wagyu flown to the US that made all the difference at the event, which is considered the Academy Awards of barbecue.
These gents are also masterminding the rapid growth of their Barbecue Mafia business, which launched with a series of pop up stalls across Brisbane in 2015.
A real break came last November when they started selling brisket, pulled pork, beef ribs and hot links at the Western Magpies footy grounds in Chelmer.
Now, they plan to launch at the Coorparoo Kings AFL Club early next month, with a pop up stand this Sunday already generating $9000 in pre-orders from their website.
Sales from the Sandgate Hawks AFL Club will also kick off later this year, giving the business a good geographic spread across the city.
When they’re all up and running, each site will have big smokers filled with ironbark, oak and cherry wood slowly cooking the meat for more than 12 hours.
Clubs with underutilized commercial kitchen and bar space have welcomed the extra business, which caters for both takeaway and casual eating on site Thursdays to Saturdays.
We hear bar takings have surged at Chelmer since November.