Page 13: Strip club Showgirls Bar 20, brothel Daily Planet, to close

A STRIP club and Melbourne’s most notorious brothel will finally bump and grind to a halt, with the owner saying he feels appropriately screwed.

Daily Planet chairman John Trimble (right) with former chief executive Andrew Harris.

KING St strip club Showgirls Bar 20 and Melbourne’s most notorious brothel, Daily Planet, will finally bump and grind to a halt. Publicly listed company Planet Platinum will be wound up by the end of ­November.

Owner JOHN TRIMBLE said he felt appropriately screwed from the proceedings following an order of the Supreme Court of Victoria, which put the company in the lap of liquidators ­FERRIER HODGSON last December.

Showgirls Bar 20 in King St.

“They wanted me to bend over but I would not,” Trimble told Page 13.

“And now they’ve destroyed the ­f---ing lot. It makes me sick. It’s been total abuse for eight years.”

The Grollo Group cemented a deal with liquidators to acquire the prime real estate in King St in Melbourne’s CBD last Friday.

Rialto hard-hat half-owners ­LORENZ and RINO GROLLO have long eyed the site, once a grain warehouse, as part of their plan to “clean up” the southern end of King St, long a ­notorious partying hotspot.

PETER IWANIUK’s Inflation nightclub is now the only building in the block not in their control.

Lorenz Grollo said Melbourne had “evolved” and the exotic clubs were a relic of the past. “A change was inevitable,” he said.

He added that the Grollo Group planned to pump $200 million into the Rialto region, spending $100 million on refurbishing the Rialto tower and the other $100 million on the ­“regeneration” of the ground floor and precinct.

Bar 20 and its famed Arabian room will be closed as the first part of the project.

Trimble, nephew of Australia’s once most-wanted man, the late crime boss ROBERT “AUSSIE BOB” TRIMBOLE, said the strippers were told the “sad” news this week.

“They are all pretty distressed. It was a fantastic company and they just want to wind it up.”

The Daily Planet went public with much fanfare back in 2003 with New York madam HEIDI FLEISS flown in to watch the first brothel list on the Australian Stock Exchange.

Trimble said he didn’t want to go out with a bang and had grown “tired of all the bulls---”.

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