Creditors urged to liquidate Clive Palmer nickel refinery

Creditors of Clive Palmer’s Queensland Nickel refinery will be urged today to plunge the business into liquidation.

Clive Palmer on the Gold Coast on Sunday. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Creditors of Clive Palmer’s Queensland Nickel refinery will be urged today to plunge the cash-strapped business into liquidation, as former workers call on the ­federal government to expedite the payment of their redundancy entitlements.

This morning, voluntary administrators FTI Consulting will release a critical report into Queensland Nickel Pty Ltd’s downfall, understood to confirm The Australian’s revelation that Mr Palmer secretly ran the troubled refinery near Townsville, north Queensland, for years under the alias Terry Smith.

The report will recommend that creditors — owed more than $100 million, including $73m in entitlements for nearly 800 redundant workers — vote to liquidate the company at a creditors’ meeting on Friday.

Only then will former staff be able to claim a payout of their entitlements from the federal government’s Fair Entitlements Guarantee, after Employment Minister Michaelia Cash stalled on requests she fast-track the activation of the scheme for the struggling north Queenslanders.

FTI’s report will confirm the company does not have the funds to pay workers.

Mr Palmer yesterday wrote to ABC managing director Mark Scott ahead of last night’s Four Corners program, insisting it was the administrators’ decision not to pay entitlements, and to deny that Queensland Nickel had given loans to other entities in his corporate empire. “Any reports to the contrary are false and have been written to cause malicious damage,” he wrote.

The corporate watchdog, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission, will pay close attention to the report, which is expected to confirm Mr Palmer acted as a “shadow director”, potentially making him legally liable for the company’s downfall.

There was little sympathy among Mr Palmer’s former workers at a community meeting in Townsville yesterday, which heard hundreds of workers sacked from the plant were struggling to find new jobs, pay bills and feed their families. A group of ex-workers is distributing food packages to former colleagues who cannot make ends meet.

Cassandra Maloney’s husband, Paul, was made redundant from a Queensland Nickel job at Townsville’s port. Ms Maloney said they had to find a new income quickly or risk losing their home, bought in November just weeks before Mr Maloney was sacked.

“The bank’s going to take our house off us,” she told the meeting. “I can’t even pay rates.”

Chemical engineer Anne Berg was made redundant from the refinery in January after 18 months in a “job I loved”. Next week, she, her partner and their young son Ethan move from Townsville to Moranbah in central Queensland, where she has found a new job.

“I don’t understand how it’s legal to keep operating when you don’t have the money to pay the entitlements of workers,” Ms Berg said of Mr Palmer.

Last month, two of Mr Palmer’s companies dumped the under-­administration Queensland Nickel as operator of the refinery and replaced it with another company. The plant has been shut ever since.

Ms Berg said waiting for a redundancy payout was stressful for her and her former colleagues: “It needs to be paid as soon as possible, especially for people who have been there for 40 years and are owed more than $100,000.”