NT Beverages water bottling company placed into administration with 12 staff stood down

UPDATED: A water bottling company has been shut down less than a year after it received a $10 million Government loan

A bottle of NT Beverages’ Akuna Blue bottled water. Picture: Facebook

A WATER bottling company has been shut down less than a year after it received a $10 million Government loan.

Administrators have been called in to take over NT Beverages — makers of Akuna Springs and Akuna Blue water products — with the company’s 12 staff stood down on Tuesday.

They will be without pay over Christmas as the administrators seek to find a party interested in taking over the business.

A creditors meeting will be held in Darwin on December 27, with a January 14 deadline given to find a buyer or permanently shut down the business.

Production at the company’s Acacia Hills bottling plant has already ceased.

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Administrator Stewart McCallum from Ferrier Hodgson said the employees had been paid up until Tuesday, but had now been stood down as proposals for the business are worked through.

“I didn’t want to terminate them because if there’s any deal that I do the employees will be part of that deal so I didn’t want to limit that,” he said.

Mr McCallum said it was too early to say whether any of the $10 million given to NT Beverages through the Northern Territory Infrastructure Development Fund would be recouped.

NT Beverages was the only company to receive money from the $200 million NTIDF set up by the former Giles CLP Government after the sale of TIO.

Treasurer Nicole Manison last month shut down the fund with some of the money used to pay off the Government’s ballooning debt.

But she has refused to investigate the awarding of the money to the company.

Asked last month if there was any way the Government could overrule the NTIDF and retrieve the money she said: “No, that money has been invested.”

Questions were raised earlier this year about why the money was given to NT Beverages, given it did not have a water extraction licence.

The company also faced accusations it had overstated the health benefits of its products and that the charitable foundation it set up in 2015 had never made a donation.