Mark Hawthorne from The Age will be tweeting live from the Supreme Court today where public examination is underway of key players in the collapse of Bill Express. Follow Mark on Twitter at CollinsSpencer. It is unusual to have a live news feed, via Twitter, from the Supreme Court.
Newsagents should follow Mark’s tweets and stay across this fascinating story which caused tremendous disruption and cost to our channel.
In other Bill Express news this week:
- Julian Little, former Director of Bill Express and point person between Bill Express and the ANF is working in Dubai on, yep, a bill payment project. Mark Hawthorne at The Age reported earlier this week that the liquidator will seek an arrest warrant for Julian Little if he refuses to leave Dubai and appear at the public hearing.
- Yesterday, questioning in the Supreme Court surrounded cash transfers to Australian Private Networks (APN). In June 2008 I noted that APN was then 95.5% owned by Telecards Asia and that Telecards Asia was owned by Sandro DiDonato – a many closely associations with plenty of businesses in the Bill express universe. The Age has more on the APN questions.
While newsagents really only want to know if they will be pursued for the equipment leases and what they can do with the old Bill Express equipment, the extraordinary public examination currently under way will shed some light on what went wrong and offer a reminder why industry associations are better off not getting involved in commercial activities.
The ANF led newsagents into Bill Express, strongly recommending they take it on. The ANF had not undertaken any due diligence. When the business went south in 2008, the ANF let newsagents down with no advice followed by poor advice before finally offering the right advice.