Any reference to CASACIR or its directors, shareholders, owners or operators relates to pre-14 February 2024 when the company was sold. In no way can anything said relate to the company or its new owners, operators, directors, and shareholders after that sale.
I have to ask what they were thinking when choosing the company name: a WC is water-closet which is a polite and old fashioned name for a toilet! I could have more to say about it, but read on, see for yourself and make your own judgement!
Anthony Cant (“Tony”) from Romanis Cant, the trustee for my bankruptcy estate, hired WC to do the investigations from 2018. They were presumably thorough but, unsurprisingly, found nothing that warranted further action. They then further investigated and, if they found anything (which would have not been possible given that there was nothing to find), they did nothing about it. I was discharged from bankruptcy in August 2021, but then, once funded by man X and man Y (who very deliberately belatedly waited until 2023 to fund further investigations), supposedly, some things were found that needed to be looked into. However, reading the list of documents to be produced, it is clear, at least according to my view of things, that the list was written by or on behalf of man X and man Y. I say this because they are demanding things that I believe only man X and man Y would want.
At no time had WC tried to contact either my husband (who is not involved in my bankruptcy other than being a secured creditor) or me to seek further information and documentation.
On 9 February 2024, we were shocked to discover a posted letter to each of us from WC, written by Gareth Brodie (“Gareth”), a senior ligation lawyer in WC. In that letter Gareth demanded a time and place to serve us with Federal Circuit Court documents. What?? No details of what this was about or why, nothing but this demand. He asked for a response – I presume he meant a response giving a time and place, but I responded on the same day asking what it was all about. No response.
My husband then emailed Gareth the next day wanting to know why he was included in the Court action given that he was only a secured creditor. Again, no reply, and his question has never been answered.
On 14 February, I again emailed Gareth, but still no response. I consider his failure to respond to either of us as extremely rude, especially given that he had asked for responses from each of us.
On 21 February, I yet again emailed Gareth and this time I said that if there was no response, I would have to get legal help.
Not surprisingly, he then finally responded by way of an emailed letter enclosing the Summons and Orders as well as a letter dated 27 November 2023, all proving that he had sat on it all for 3 months, including by failing to serve us when the Orders demanded that he do so. Actually, it was probably the fact that a hearing was held on 5 February (that we had no knowledge of) that spurred Gareth to actually take the first steps to serving us. Further, I found it extraordinary to believe that those 2 letters dated 27 November 2023 had been sent out as implied – one to each of us – and yet neither was received! It is critical to note that Tony and his colleagues had had both my husband’s and my email addresses since August 2018 and would have passed them on to Gareth. The 27 November 2023 letter stated that it provided the Summons and Order by way of service – yet the letter was not actually sent to either of us. it is untruthful anyway given that Gareth stated in his letter of 5 February that service had to be performed by physically handing over of the documents. The 27 November letter also stated that a link would be provided by the Court (no such link was sent to me or us), and that we had to respond to the court by 22 January (a month earlier than the letter he now actually sent) for a hearing on 5 February 2024 (the same date as the first letter authored and actually sent to us by Gareth). I find the 27 November 2023 letter to be very untruthful to say the least and I don’t believe that it actually existed until it was produced in an effort to say he had served us with the summons and order.
Our email responses to Gareth’s 21 February letter resulted in him finally admitting that he had not tried to serve us: “I confirm proceeding MLG1823/2023 was returnable before the Court on 5 February 2024. The summonses had not been served at that point and as such, the examinations were adjourned to Monday 4 March…” – although he does infer that they had tried to serve the documents when they had not. So he had deliberately, or incompetently, delayed serving us and had seriously, deliberately, knowingly, and willingly, wasted the Court’s time.
In spite of agreeing to a time and date for being served, Gareth failed to serve us with the Order adjourning the 5 February hearing until 4 March – i.e. we still have not been served with it!! If we ignore the fact that he has not actually served us with the Order, by Gareth deliberately delaying service and notification, he ensured that we only had just over a week to prepare for the new 4 March hearing, which is grossly insufficient – but that was probably the plan given what has transpired.
The Summons demanded information and documents that were either in Tony’s (and therefore in Gareth’s) control already, or were out of time (they wanted information going back to 7 years prior to me being forced into bankruptcy!!), or were entirely irrelevant and, in some cases, of an entirely legal professional privilege nature. They even wanted my husband’s personal bank account transactions and his tax returns from 2011 to 2018 in spite of the fact that he had nothing to do with any of it other than being a secured creditor.
The Summons did ask where 2 amounts of money had been spent, which was fair enough, and I have been able to explain it – yet the matter continues.
Gareth is so clever that he believes that he can arrange a meeting for 2 days before he sends the invitation (he sent a letter on 28 February, dated 28 February, making note of the requirement that we respond by 26 February!). Amazing – some sort of time warp I suppose.
The action that Gareth initiated has been termed as being “procedurally unfair” – and that is by a very senior former legal practitioner. Either Gareth knows that what he is doing is wrong and simply does not care, or he is not the expert he claims to be.
WC claims to be a company with significant expertise in the area of bankruptcy and insolvency. WC’s website makes such claims as [emphasis added] “Our legal team are already highly skilled”, “we will be there whenever you need the advice and input of a professional”, “most importantly, we offer solutions”, “contact us first so that we can assist you in achieving the best possible outcome”, “We can give you realistic advice on the best way to recover outstanding debts while minimising costs”, and “Please contact us to help you navigate the best outcomes from what can be a difficult situation”. Gareth’s personal WC page states that one of his “areas of expertise” is “bankruptcy and insolvency”.
Therefore, unless they lied in their claims, it is therefore impossible to believe that the deep investigations performed by WC on the trustee’s behalf during the term of my bankruptcy were insufficient. We claim that WC did do a proper and thorough job of investigating. They worked on a contingency basis – a no win/no fee basis – so they were eager to find whatever they could in order to get paid, but they found nothing amiss.
The court ordered that each of us sign copies of our own transcript and return then to Gareth so that they could have them, presumably to try to use against us. However, when Brodie sent transcripts to us, there were 2 issues: the first being that his office had put our full names, including middle names, on the front of each of the envelopes, thus providing anyone interested in trying to take advantage and commence identity theft with a good start, and secondly, he had only sent the second day of each of our interrogations as if they were the full set. When approached for the supply of the first day’s transcript, he initially ignored our communications, and failed to apologise for breaching our privacy.
I contend that Gareth has not been honest to the court, and certainly not to us. This is bleak contradiction to the words of Steve Mark, the then NSW Legal Services Commissioner when he stated in his presentation to the Australian Young Lawyers Stream on 18 September 2009 (Ethic in Litigation and Court Proceedings) that:
Practitioners should remember that at the basis of the ethical duty not to mislead the Court, lies the simple notion of honesty. Honesty is critical to an ethical legal practice. As the Deputy President of one Disciplinary Tribunal recently stated:
Honesty in a practitioner’s dealing with the Court is a fundamental pillar of the administration of justice in this State. It is a primary duty of a legal practitioner. Without that linchpin of honesty, the administration of justice and public confidence in it would falter. The duty is critical to the lawyer’s role. The Court and the public not only expect it, but rely on it, and assume it in their dealings with legal practitioners.[1]
[1] Quoting the Legal Practitioners Complaints Committee and Vogt [2009] WASAT 125 per Eckert J at [65]. See also Council of the Queensland Law Society Inc v Wright[2001] QCA 58 at [67], where the McMurdo P stated:
“The effective administration of the justice system and public confidence in it substantially depends on the honesty and reliability of practitioners’ submissions to the court. This duty of candour and fairness is quintessential to the lawyer’s role as officer of the court; the court and the public expect and rely upon it, no matter how new or inexperienced the practitioner. Breaches such as this are hard to detect and once established to the requisite standard are deserving of condign punishment, not only as a deterrent but also to reassure the public that such conduct on the part of lawyers will not be tolerated.”