Little hope for creditors in Hastie administration

Creditors of failed construction company Hastie have been told by the company’s administrator that it was going to be tough for creditors to get returns.

Speaking at a creditors meeting in Melbourne yesterday, Ian Carson, of PPB Advisory, said Hastie owed $500 million to the banks and around $100 million to non-bank creditors.

A spokesperson for PPB told SmartCompany that Carson was “fairly frank” at the meeting about the outlook for the creditors and said there is going to be a line of creditors and it is going to be “relatively tough” getting a return.

The spokesperson said creditors will rank in different ways in “quite a complex equation”, and if funds are left that is how they will be distributed.

Only 100 people around the country attended the creditors meetings. There were meetings in each state because Hastie’s companies are domiciled in different states.

The spokesperson said the meetings were “largely procedural” and confirmed the appointment of an administrator and a timetable for getting back to creditors.

At the meetings, Carson announced that he was pleased that approximately 1,200 workers out of 2,700 Hastie employees in Australia appear to have been re-employed through asset sales or shifting to contractors or other employment.

In addition, a few small sales of businesses are to be announced, which PPB’s spokesperson said will probably be detailed today, taking it to 435 jobs saved by asset sales.

Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten has exercised his discretion to enable affected Hastie Group employees to commence a claim process immediately under the Federal Government’s General Employee Entitlements and Redundancy Scheme.

GEERS is typically only available when a company has entered liquidation and not when it is in administration.

“This is an excellent development for Hastie employees,” Craig Crosbie, partner at PPB Advisory, said in a statement yesterday.

“Hastie employees stand to receive their outstanding employee entitlements within a six-week time frame, far sooner than the typical process would allow.”

Hastie had about 7,000 workers around the world when it collapsed late last month.