Clive Palmer’s creditors size up administrators

Clive’s creditors size up admin folks

Creditors owed tens of millions by Clive Palmer’s Queensland Nickel are mulling their options ahead of a meeting this Friday with administrators at FTI Consulting appointed by the fast-deflating metals magnate.

At issue is whether FTI might be a little too close to Palmer — or Terry Smith, the moniker he used to run the Townsville refinery — and whether a rival firm might be better placed.

In October Palmer boasted QN was “debt-free”, but a week ago, when he called in FTI’s fab four, John Park, Kelly-Anne Trenfield, Stefan Dopking and Quentin Olde, it owed at least $70m, with Aurizon alone said to be owed as much as $27m.

There’s no love lost between FTI and the firm favoured as a possible ring-in, Korda Mentha, from which Park and colleagues broke away in 2012.

It was while at Korda Mentha that Park and co-worker Ginette Muller first did a Palmer gig, taking on Clive’s troubled resort/dinosaur park Coolum Resort in late February 2012 and handing it back four weeks later.

Later that year, Muller and Joanne Dunn liquidated Palmer’s A-League team, Gold Coast United, following Clive’s bitter stoush with Football Federation Australia and Westfield boss Frank Lowy.

The following year Park and Muller, by then with FTI, had a nasty run-in with Queensland Supreme Court judge Jean Dalton, who booted them from running the First Mortgage Income Fund operated by Gold Coast entrepreneur Peter Drake’s failed LM empire after finding they “preferred their own commercial interests to the interests of the fund”.

Happily, many of her honour’s findings about the pair’s conduct were overturned on appeal, although sadly they didn’t get the gig back.

The QN job itself was “referred to FTI Consulting by Clive Palmer”, FTI told creditors last week, while reassuring them there were “no real or potential risks to our independence”. And Park told Margin Call creditors hadn’t raised turfing FTI.

“It’s certainly contrary to discussions we’ve had with major stakeholders,” he said.

Park said Muller dealt with Palmer on the Coolum job and he met the magnate for the first time on January 10.

And where is Muller, for whom Dalton reserved her harshest words?

Her LinkedIn profile calls her a “senior managing director” at FTI, but Park says that’s wrong. “Ginette is just a consultant to the business,” he said.

Oodles of Booodl link

It’s not just the marriage registry linking motor-boating mogul James Packer with missus Erica Baxter, from whom he needs to consciously uncouple so that he can make good on his 35-carat promise to marry songbird Mariah Carey.

Israeli resident Packer and LA lady Baxter are also linked — at least until the next tech crash — through dot.com Booodl.

Baxter is a shareholder through her vehicle Cheetah B, while Packer’s holding is through Park Street’s Chermon.

Each holds about 1.25 per cent of Booodl’s ordinary stock and Paul Bassat’s Packer-backed Square Peg fund is also in there.

Ferrovial digs in

Dashing Ferrovial executive Santiago Olivares has left the country, but there’s no siesta for burros working on the Spanish group’s Broadspectrum bid.

They’ll be spending the next month trying to convince shareholders in the former Transfield that it was wrong to reject the $1.35-a-share offer.

Ferrovial also wants more info about contracts so that it can waive bid conditions. Key is the big gig running Peter Dutton’s Nauru and Manus Island detention centres, which is being renegotiated and is due to expire next month. Broadspectrum and key shareholder Allan Gray reckon the company’s doing better than last year when Ferrovial offered $2 a share, which doesn’t jibe with independent expert Ernst & Young that it’s worth $1.98 at most.

Pots of dough

With a desert island discovery, Ian Narev’s CBA has won the title of most exotically placed ATM in Asia from Shayne Elliott’s ANZ.

Under old boss Mike Smith, ANZ set up at Singapore’s Orchard Towers, a building better known on the island state for its “four floors of whores”.

But CBA’s ATM on Indonesian backpacker fave Gili Trawangan, off Lombok, beats that. Until recently there were no cops, resulting in a brisk cash trade in marijuana. Thankfully CBA has been there since 2012, so the stoners never run out of rupiah.

[e-mail] christine.lacy@theaustralian. com.au