Let's bring it on, says Packer

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James Packer has dared former business partner Jodee Rich and the special purpose liquidator of One.Tel to proceed with threatened damages suits against Consolidated Press Holdings.

Consolidated Press would be able to succeed where the corporate regulator had failed and prove in court ''the true financial position'' of One.Tel, it promised yesterday.

The company said suits threatened by Mr Rich, One.Tel's managing director and the liquidator, Paul Weston, would be fought on more evidence than was admitted in the NSW Supreme Court case comprehensively lost by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission on Wednesday.

''The procedures ... the issues to be determined and the burden and standard of proof will be vastly different from the ASIC case,'' CPH said.

Its chairman, James Packer, reiterated his eight-year-old statement that he was ''profoundly misled'' about the telephone company's finances. Justice Robert Austin dismissed every aspect of ASIC's claims that Mr Rich and One.Tel's former finance director, Mark Silbermann, had breached their directors' duties.

ASIC failed to prove ''the true financial circumstances'' of One.Tel in the four months leading to its May 2001 collapse and therefore could not show that the pair had breached their duties by misleading the board and by failing to cease trading, the judge said.

Consolidated Press and its publicly listed associate, Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd (now Consolidated Media Holdings), were large shareholders of One.Tel, along with News Ltd, whose then chairman Lachlan Murdoch, like Mr Packer, was a non-executive director.

Mr Weston and Mr Rich filed separate cases against PBL, News and several advisory firms in 2007 but have not activated them by serving them.

Mr Weston said yesterday he had a job to do and he was getting on with it. Mr Rich was on a plane and unavailable to comment.

If Mr Weston proceeds, he will sue over the abandonment of a planned $132 million capital raising, which PBL and News had promised to underwrite.

Including interest, the suit will seek to recover $230 million for One.Tel's creditors left $340 million out of pocket by the collapse.

Last year Mr Weston rejected a PBL offer to settle for $17 million, of which $2 million was to go to Mr Rich.

Justice Austin said on Wednesday an injection of $132 million ''accompanied by continuing support by the major shareholders would probably have been enough to address the company's cash requirement until November 2001, by which time, according to the business plans, the company's businesses would have been generating more healthy group cash flow''.

''The withdrawal of that support, and the abandonment of the rights issue, may well have ensured that the company could not survive,'' the judge said. ASIC wanted the judge to ban Mr Rich and Mr Silbermann from company directorship.

- © Fairfax NZ News