Jon:
Lee in Melbourne; morning to you Lee.
Lee:
Morning Jon and David, how are you today?
DW:
Welcome.
Lee:
Just my question is I’ve been trying to get some legal advice about stopping a builder from opening every six months to a year, he opens new building companies, he’s not paying his bills and he causes so much heartache.
DW:
Now is he a registered business person? A registered builder?
Lee:
He’s not.
DW:
So he’s got a handyman type business, has he?
Lee:
Yes.
DW:
And are they companies that he opens each time?
Lee:
They are companies, PAYG companies. He went into liquidation about two or three times under his own name. Then he changed his name a couple of times, and then he started putting friends and relatives, he started paying people to become the directors of his companies.
Jon:
Now this is called ‘phoenixing’, Lee. It’s been a feature of Australian corporate skulduggery for as long as anyone can remember; where you shut down on Friday and open the same business under a new name – but effectively keeping the old business going without picking up its debts – on the following Monday. It is illegal but very hard to police, David, isn’t it?
DW:
There’s the phoenixing where there’s the same person each time. That one you can report to ASIC. But where it’s different people each time, it gets hard for you to prove; but ASIC are the people who police the phoenixing.
So you’d come along and say I think that builder x is the person behind this company. You give ASIC the list of all of the ones that you’ve found and the fact that they’ve failed and that they appear to be running substantially the same business, with the same phone numbers, from the same address and that there are now other companies doing exactly the same thing. But the person who answers the phone and who turns up to do the quotes is the same person.
Lee:
I did that. ASIC told me that they cannot do anything about it, I should take it legally. But he’s been doing this for about 15 years. I personally know him for 12 years, he’s been on TV.
DW:
The problem, Lee, is that you want someone else to run the case. What you could do if you were really game is that you could run ads that said exactly what you were talking about and then have him sue you and the newspapers or the billboard companies if you turned out to be wrong. The issue is really one of resources from the policing authorities.
Jon:
Alright.
I’ve got any number of people joining in still on the burglar alarm that doesn’t get turned off story. From people saying all sorts of things to do with the creative use of a golf club.
DW:
That assumes that it’s on the outside of the house Jon.
Jon:
Yes, look I like this one though from Ray in Corio, you can go to the hardware shop and buy expanding foam and spray it into the alarm box.
DW:
Yes.
Jon:
Apparently it crushes the. Stops the noise and suppresses any sound. Ray from Corio passing on a trick.
DW:
You learn a lot here, don’t you.
Jon:
He may well have learnt that when he was doing his time in youth detention, I don’t know (laughs). We had an old car with the alarm going on all night, someone broke in under the bonnet, smashed the windows, no one got any sleep says John in St Kilda, I feel sympathy for these people.
If you turn off the power to turn off the alarm and then you turn it on again to save the neighbours freezer does that solve the problem? Someone else says call the police and tell them you think there might be someone in trouble inside and they’ll go in and do a welfare check. Which is a variation on the fire brigade theme that was suggested before. But let’s keep moving through.