Phoenix business are the bane of any industry, as they effectively shed their debt for next to nothing and start again, or carry on, while competitors have to operate paying their way, which means they have to charge more for their print.
Two high profile cases, both of whom denied they were phoenixes, occupied the minds of rival printers this year, Chameleon in Queensland, and Picton Press in WA.
Chameleon was part of the Krico Group, owned by Kevin Krieger. It went belly up in May owing $4m to unsecured creditors, but a new company soon emerged, Chameleon Group Australia Pty Ltd, owned by office admin worker Emma van der Pluym, who also happened to be the long time girlfriend of Krieger's son Chris Krieger.
Chris Krieger himself is currently banned from being a company director on account of being convicted of an insurance fraud involving a fire and a printer which did not exist. Krieger told Print21, 'Mate we haven't phoenixed anything'.
Across the country in WA Picton Press owners Garry Kennedy and Denis Hague put the business into voluntary administration in May when they failed to come up with the cash for the $1.3m they owed to the ATO, which then sought a winding up order.
Four months later the administrator managed to get a Deed of Company Arrangement into play, despite almost all the unsecured creditors voting against it, hardly surprising as they were offered between just 1c and 2c in the dollar on the $3.6m they were owed.
The rest of the Perth printing community is up in arms at the prospect of Picton competing again when it has managed to translate a $3.6m debt into a sum of between $36,000 and $72,000.