Clive Palmer to fight asset-freeze bid by taxpayer-funded liquidators

Clive Palmer’s golf courses could be closed with the loss of 50 jobs if liquidators can freeze $400m of his assets.

Clive Palmer in Brisbane. Picture: Liam Kidston

Clive Palmer’s four Queensland golf courses could be shut down and 50 people forced out of work if taxpayer-funded liquidators succeed in a bid to freeze $400 million of his personal and corporate assets, the former federal MP claims.

Queensland Nickel special purpose liquidators PPB Advisory will today ask Queensland Supreme Court judge John Bond to urgently freeze Mr Palmer’s holdings to stop the resources magnate shifting his wealth offshore away from the refinery company’s creditors.

Mr Palmer is strenuously defending the action and will today represent himself in court, arguing the liquidators’ case is an “overreach designed to damage” him. “(The case is) an abuse made for an improper purpose to, in ­effect, destroy my livelihood, the companies I own and their employees, to achieve further bad publicity against me for political reasons of the parties who instruct (the liquidators),” Mr Palmer said in a sworn affidavit.

An affidavit signed by one of Mr Palmer’s executives, Nui Harris, warns the court that Palmer Leisure Australia might be forced to “close down operations” if liquidators are successful.

Through the company, Mr Palmer owns two Gold Coast golf courses and the Sea Reef course at Port Douglas, as well as 40 residential lots at the far north Queensland site worth $11.4m.

The founder of the now-­defunct Palmer United Party also owns the Palmer Coolum Resort on the Sunshine Coast, where the accommodation is dormant but the golf course is still operating.

Liquidators are seeking to reimburse creditors out of pocket by $300m from the collapse of Mr Palmer’s Queensland Nickel last year, which also cost 800 workers their jobs.

Mr Palmer also says he is a good Catholic who would never “take steps to frustrate” the court process and hide or sell his assets, and a dedicated Queenslander who would never flee the jurisdiction: “I regard my faith as the most important thing in my life.”

Mr Palmer said he had ­removed his fugitive nephew Clive Mensink — the sole registered director of Queensland Nickel when it collapsed — as ­director when he did not return to Australia.