‘Holidays and sore foot’ kept Clive Palmer too busy for QN

Clive Palmer has declared he was more interested in his sore foot than the demise of Queensland Nickel.

Clive Palmer, flanked by security guards, arrives at the Federal Court yesterday.

Clive Palmer has declared he was more interested in his sore foot and tropical island holiday than the demise of Queensland Nickel, as he threatens High Court action to keep his bank balance secret.

In a fiery day of evidence in the Federal Court examination into the Townsville firm’s $300 million collapse, the former federal MP said he had “no idea” how much cash was in his “suite” of National Australia Bank and Papua New Guinean bank accounts.

“I won’t voluntarily provide you with anything,” Mr Palmer told barrister Tom Sullivan QC, for special-purpose liquidators PPB Advisory, as he indicated he would seek High Court action. Mr Palmer denied having “intimate” involvement in plunging QN into voluntary administration, before being forced to admit he had been meeting prospective administrators for weeks beforehand.

He also became flustered and demanded the court registrar ­intervene when he was pressed about whether he had known last year that insolvent trading was a serious criminal and corporate ­offence.

“You’re really getting desperate now (Mr Sullivan),” he laughed. “I shouldn’t be cross-­examined on that, registrar.”

Late yesterday, it was revealed Mr Palmer claimed to have held a secret meeting on September 1 that purported to ratify retrospectively six years’ of pencil-written resolutions in his mysterious “little green book”. The notebook is key to Mr Palmer’s insistence he could do whatever he wanted with Queensland Nickel’s cash and ­resources, including donating to his political party and propping up the rest of his corporate empire.

The Federal Court, sitting in Brisbane, heard Mr Palmer’s solicitors disclosed the meeting to the liquidators only on Monday, after Mr Palmer was interrogated in court about the notebook’s contents.

Asked by Mr Sullivan why he had bothered to hold the meeting so long after the resolutions, and apparently just before he was due to testify, Mr Palmer scoffed: “It was purely just to annoy you.”

Queensland Nickel collapsed into voluntary administration on January 15, costing 800 north Queensland workers their jobs and leaving $300m in unpaid debts. Federal taxpayers had to fund more than $65m in redundancy entitlements.

Mr Palmer testified it was “rubbish” to suggest he had been intimately involved in the decision to appoint administrators. However, he was then shown text messages to his phone from QN executives from as early as December 21, canvassing insolvency experts.

The self-proclaimed billionaire said he had not opened the documents sent by QN’s former chief financial officer Daren Wolfe ­because he was on holiday in New Caledonia with his family.

“I wasn’t interested in business … it was the Christmas period. I was more focused on the happiness of my children and my relationship with my wife,” he said.

Asked later whether he was kept abreast of QN’s inner workings after it was placed into administration, Mr Palmer said no, he was entirely preoccupied with his injured foot. “My foot took top priority in my thinking,” he said.

Mr Palmer has finished giving evidence for now. He will apply to the High Court to stop liquidators conducting further interrogations, but it is understood this will be vigorously opposed.