Following the review of the Fair Work Act 2009 conducted earlier this year, the federal government has introduced a number of Bills into the Parliament to reform the Act. One of the Bills is the Fair Entitlements Guarantee Bill 2012 which was introduced to provide for financial assistance for workers who have not been fully paid for work done for insolvents or bankrupts.

In discussing the Bill, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Bill Shorten said:

ITSA has released its Insolvency Compliance Strategy 2012-2013 which confirms that, between July 2012 and June 2013, ITSA will concentrate the resources in its compliance program on specified technical areas by:

As noted in our recent insolvency law update, the Western Australian Court of Appeal has recently delivered its judgment (comprising over 1,000 pages) on one of Australia's longest running pieces of litigation: Westpac Banking Corporation v The Bell Group (in liq) [No 3].

In Saraceni v Mentha [No.2] [2012] WASC 336 a director sought to challenge the appointment of receivers to Westgem Investments Pty Ltd ("Westgem") under a fixed and floating charge ("the Charge").  In 2008 Westgem entered into a Facility Agreement with financiers and executed the Charge, which charged the "secured property".

The plaintiff contended that:

Before the recent decision in Rubin and another v Eurofinance SA and others and New Cap Reinsurance Corporation (In liq) and another v AE Grant [2012] UKSC 46 (the joint appeal of two earlier cases) (the Rubin/New Cap Appeal), an insolvency judgment obtained in an Australian court could be enforced in the UK despite falling outside of the traditional common law enforceability rules.

The Rubin/New Cap Appeal has now removed this special treatment afforded to foreign insolvency judgments and the old common law rules once again apply.

Australian banks have historically relied on formal liquidation, voluntary administration and receivership processes available under the under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) and under general law where informal restructurings have failed. There has been little appetite for exploring alternative methods to exit distressed situations by debt trading.

On 1 December 2011 the Farm Debt Mediation Act 2011 (Vic) commenced operation. Under the Act, a farm debt mediation scheme is implemented which makes it compulsory for banks and other creditors to offer mediation to farmers before commencing debt recovery proceedings against the farmer on mortgages. Special Counsel, Jacqueline Browning discusses the scheme, which is about to mark its first anniversary of operation.

Key features

Some key features of the new Act (which in many ways mirrors similar legislation in NSW) are as follows:

A case this week in New South Wales involving a dispute between the residents of a retirement village and the operator of a retirement village reminded us of some of the issues that can arise when a village goes into liquidation.  

The Federal Government has announced its intention to amend the Fair Work Act 2009 (FW Act) in response to the three-member panel's review of the FW Act in August this year, which we analysed in our earlier article.

Section 254 of the ITAA imposes obligations on agents and trustees concerning income, profit or gains of a capital nature.

Application of the section extends to liquidators, receivers and administrators by virtue of the extended definition given to the term "trustee" in section 6(1) of the ITAA.

Section 254 provides that agents and trustees are: