There's an interesting game of musical chairs emerging at Pluton Resources, with some of the big names of the accounting world worrying about who might be holding the bag when the music stops.
Pluton collapsed under $100 million of debt, with joint-venture partners and suppliers Wise and Hong Kong's General Nice Group feuding over the scraps of the iron ore-rich Cockatoo Island, off Western Australia.
Well-known Melbourne insolvency firm KordaMentha was hired as a receiver between November 4, 2014, and March 23, 2015, and then retired. Pitcher Partners are the new receivers.
Under section 419 of the Corporations Act, receivers are personally liable for any debts a company incurs while they are at the helm.
According to the last creditors meeting, Pluton's debts were $8.5 million while KordaMentha was in charge.
"That would be one of the biggest personal liabilities a receiver having to pick up in many years," said a veteran Collins Street type.
Word is KordaMentha is not too worried. It says the debt is less than $5 million and not only has the firm reaped millions from Ansett and Timbercorp in the past decade but they are in possession of a letter of indemnity from General Nice and lien over Pluton's assets.
In addition, the joint-venture partner, General Nice, is worth more than $US10 billion and employs about 10,000 people. Let's hope they are good for the cash.
Just to add further confusion, administrator Ernst & Young quit last week after it emerged it had a conflict of interest as both a shareholder and a creditor of Pluton. PricewaterhouseCoopers has now been appointed.
The whole sorry mess will be sorted out should General Nice shareholders turn out to be generally nice and vote to release the funds of a capital raising to Pluton.
Tweet or twit?
Australia's home-grown Sun King Rupert Murdoch likes to tell people what's wot.
But it is one thing to claim the British Conservative party's 1992 victory and another to challenge someone about their racial identity. That's something his columnist Andrew Bolt, of the Herald Sun, learnt the hard way through the courts.
Still, on Thursday Murdoch took finger to touchscreen to suggest on Twitter that Barack Obama was not a "real black" president.
Murdoch's post included praise for Republican candidate Ben Carson, an African American, saying he was "terrific".
"What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide? And much else," Murdoch wrote.
The tweet sparked criticism from other users of the social media site, including actor Harry Shearer, who voiced many characters on The Simpsons – the long-running cartoon series aired on Murdoch's Fox Broadcasting Company.
"Can you please regularly advise black Americans on which of them is "real", so they will be free of doubt," Shearer asked Murdoch on Twitter.
Murdoch pointed followers to an article published in New York magazine that he said highlighted the "minority community disappointment" with the first African-American president of the US.
Full steam ahead
Junior mining services provider NRW Holdings has had a double win against South Korean giant Samsung C&T – the company charged with building Gina Rinehart's ambitious $10 billion Roy Hill project.
The Western Australian Supreme Court ordered Samsung to pay NRW $8.5 million for its work on Rinehart's dream mine in the Pilbara.
It came two days after the NRW scooped up $17.5 million from Samsung after the court rejected the South Korean company's challenge to a previous ruling over disputed payments between the two firms.
Samsung awarded NRW a $620 million contract in September 2013 to complete rail earthworks for the mine.
The legal stoush hasn't appeared to disrupt work at Roy Hill, which is supposed to open this month. Rinehart posted a picture on Hancock Prospect's website last month showing the first train arriving at the mine. It depicts a locomotive carrying an endless chain of carriages, which disappears behind a bend in the rusty landscape.
Entrepreneur Dick Smith gushed earlier this year that Rinehart was undertaking a project "the equivalent of ten Snowy Mountain schemes".
"I have to compliment you on your incredible abilities. I have never seen anything like it in my life!" Smith wrote.
