Albarran and Pleash prepare to defend DoCA allegations

Richard Albarran
Photo: Hall Chadwick

WHEN insolvency practitioners recommend a Deed of Company Arrangement (DoCA), it's generally based on their expectation that applying the oil of deed administration will facilitate a troubled company's passage to resolution.

For Blair Pleash and Richard Albarran however, no amount of commercial and accounting acumen has been sufficient to free up seized property developer Joe & Joe Developments.

Since the Hall Chadwick partners were appointed voluntary administrators to Joe & Joe on February 9, 2009, they and their solicitors have generated about $1.4 million in fees administering the company, which remains subject to the terms of a DoCA designed to achieve what the company’s owners couldn’t - concluding on mutually agreeable terms - their commercial and residential property development at Narrabeen on Sydney’s northern beaches.

Blair Pleash
Photo: Hall Chadwick

Pleash and Albarran became Joe & Joe’s deed administrators on March 31, 2009 but the company’s two shareholder families were locking horns as early as 2008. 

Those frustrations came to a head when one family – the Kossaifis – initiated winding-up proceedings in the NSW Supreme Court.

Liquidation posed a threat to the livelihood of members of the other shareholder – the Elias family – who are builders, and following attempts at mediation the matter was brought to Hall Chadwick in early 2009.

More than five years on, the families remain at loggerheads, Joe & Joe is still subject to the terms of its DoCA  and the mounting costs have so enraged the Elias family that it is suing Pleash and Albarran in the NSW Supreme Court, alleging the two have managed the affairs of Joe & Joe in a way prejudicial to the company’s creditors and its members. The Hall Chadwick duo reject the allegations.