Dour opening to the new Clive Palmer’s Circus season

It was meant to be a cracking new opening of the Clive Palmer ­Circus with its star attraction, the financial acrobat formerly ­described (mostly by himself) as a multi-billionaire “professor” and mining magnate, once again walking the highwire.

But the audience yesterday was deeply disappointed.

Instead of a performance by Palmer, self-styled President of the World Economic Council and Secretary-General of the World Leadership Alliance, the Federal Court heard instead from his ­former chief bean-counter at Queensland Nickel, Daren Wolfe.

These Brisbane hearings, sponsored by taxpayers and run by the lawyers, are meant to ­follow the money-trail and, if all goes to plan, claw as much dough as possible from whatever the former federal member for Fairfax and his entities have left, after he cost the public purse some $70 million for redundancy payments for his sacked staff.

Wolfe must be wondering how he got himself into this mess. Back in the halcyon days when his boss, the Palmer United Party’s founder, had a grip on the balance of power in the Senate, flew across Australia in his own jets, dazzled the ABC and enjoyed private dining time with Malcolm Turnbull, they didn’t see the liquidators coming.

But by mid-2015, Wolfe should have been alarmed the company appeared to be insolvent — ­because, after some heavy siphoning, there weren’t funds to pay the bills as they fell due.

His inquisitor, Tom Sullivan, QC, is steadily building a case that Queensland Nickel was financially busted and trading insolvent, in breach of the Corporations Act, well before it officially failed in January this year; that Palmer was always pulling the strings as a shadow director while pretending publicly to be a full-time politician; and that novel accounting techniques trickily revalued the assets to mask the significant losses, some $150m in 2015.

The evidence on the public ­record, along with some more gleaned from Wolfe yesterday, depicts Palmer and his nephew, Clive Mensink, desperately hoping for a recovery in the nickel price after running the company deep into the red, transferring tens of millions of dollars to other entities and related parties, and leaving zip for the creditors and staff.

Wolfe is the dour opening act. It was slow going at times as the former CFO, now a consultant, was stepped through documents and emails pulled from the Townsville computer servers in a forensic financial investigation.

“You were the chief financial officer, Mr Wolfe. Why is it that you don’t know why these sums were not paid?” asked Sullivan.

Wolfe confirmed that Palmer, despite his denials, was closely controlling expenditure and being briefed regularly on the company’s parlous finances.

If true that means he was a shadow director, and therefore personally liable — conclusions that Palmer is likely to deny when he comes to the Federal Court to give his circus the performance lift it needs.