Grocon extinguishes bushfire recovery business

Construction company Grocon has wound up the business it used to conduct the $75m Victorian bushfire recovery.

Grocon workers clearing the site of a Wye River property damaged by the Christmas Day bushfire in 2015. Picture: Nathan Dyer

Building giant Grocon has wound up the corporate entity that contracted its bushfire clean-up, as part of the New Year’s Eve filing which placed three further bodies into administration.

The building giant was contracted by the Victorian government to conduct the clean-up in the wake of the horrific bushfires in 2019-2020, but completed its works on August 26.

Grocon was awarded a $75m contract to conduct the clean-up operations following the fires that swept through Victoria.

Placing the business into administration alongside three other Grocon business entities adds to the 39 others already put into administration in November.

The company, Grocon Constructor (Victoria) Pty Ltd, had previously avoided the axe in the earlier wave of wind-ups from Daniel Grollo’s once great building company.

It is unclear when Grocon received its last payments from Bushfire Recovery Victoria.

Grocon had also kept its troubled $111m Northumberland Street development and $730m Sydney development called the Ribbon out of administration in the hope it could continue the projects.

KordaMentha administrators Andrew Knight and Craig Shepard will handle the wind-up of the bushfire clean-up business. A creditors meeting is scheduled for January 13 next week.

A Grocon spokeswoman directed all questions concerning the administration of the company to KordaMentha.

Grocon’s 38 clean-up crews, plus other tradies and subcontractors, undertook 372,000 hours worth of work as part of its bushfire clean-up.

The horror fires that swept through East Gippsland and North East Victoria destroyed significant areas of the state.

At its peak, almost 420 people were employed on the clean-up, including 40 Grocon employees.

One consultant and 49 subcontractors and other businesses also worked on the project.

The Australian understands that all the subcontractors on the bushfire recovery works in Victoria have been paid.

Grocon boss Daniel Grollo. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

Grocon was brought in partly to manage large amounts of hazardous asbestos from destroyed houses and sheds in the fire zone.

Crews from the construction giant cleared and cleaned up 736 properties, removing almost 75,000 tonnes of debris and waste.

Grocon’s work on the latest bushfire project came after the construction giant assisted the Victorian government’s response to the 2015 fires that devastated Wye River on the Surf Coast.

The construction company also assisted in clearing thousands of buildings in the wake of the Black Saturday bushfires that smashed Victoria in 2009.

The wind-up of Grocon’s bushfire recovery operations comes as Grocon placed its troubled Northumberland Street operations into administration.

At the time of the administration, a Grocon spokeswoman said the entities had been dormant and the wind-up was a formality

Grocon’s operations on the $111m site in Collingwood have been shut down after subcontractors on the site went unpaid.

Subcontractors are reportedly owed as much as $8m.

The Grocon building empire was laced with complex inter-company debts before its collapse, according to a statement of affairs filed with the corporate regulator by its director, Daniel Grollo.

The company’s stretched state was laid bare by the filings in November, which indicated head company Grocon Pty Ltd owed hundreds of millions of dollars to its own subsidiaries, on top of millions to external creditors, including the Australian Taxation Office.