We asked our community what they wanted to know about the Bathla administration. The questions that came back were about exposure, not blame, and the answers turned on one distinction.
“If you have a bill outstanding before the administrator rolls in, that money you’ve just got to assume is on ice potentially for years.”
That is insolvency practitioner Chris Baskerville, answering the question the builders, trades and suppliers in our community asked more than any other about the Bathla Group administration. Not who is to blame. How much is gone, and when anyone will know.
Administrators from Teneo were appointed to the group on 25 August. Preliminary figures put to the first meeting of creditors on 4 September show about $3.4 billion owed, across 45 projects in the construction phase and roughly 2,500 homes. On 7 September, five of the group’s 43 lenders agreed a short term funding line covering their own projects. Work on everything else stopped and about 213 of 350 staff were stood down.
The questions came from subcontractors, suppliers and trades with money tied up in the group. How much is gone. When anyone will find out. Whether money that left the group before the collapse can be traced. What happens to contractors still owed for work already in the ground.
Az put them to Baskerville on the podcast. Five were sent to him beforehand. Five were not.
His answers came back to the same distinction each time. What is owed matters less, for now, than where it sits in the queue and how long each stage of the process takes. On tracing money out of the group, he put the timeframe plainly.
“Yes, I think someone’s going to spend a bit of time following the money, but it’s going to take years. Because there’s a whole legal process that has to unfold first.”
Money owed before the administrators arrived is treated differently to money owed after
The clearest line Baskerville drew was between two kinds of debt.
Where an administrator engages a subcontractor after appointment, that administrator is personally liable for the bill. The engagement has to be in writing and signed off. Money owed for work done before the appointment is something else entirely. It becomes a claim against the company and joins the queue.
“Everything from administration onwards, no problem, as long as you’ve got the administrator to sign off. Everything before that, you just gotta draw a line in the sand.”
That distinction answers several of the questions at once, because several of them were asking the same thing in different words. There is no mechanism that moves a pre appointment invoice forward.
Of the $3.4 billion, roughly $3.08 billion is owed to lenders, $145 million to the Australian Taxation Office and $42 million in land tax. Unsecured creditors are owed about $130 million. Trade contractors and suppliers sit in that last figure, which is the same position they occupy when a developer goes under anywhere else in the country.
The administrators started with no cash and personal liability from day one
More than one question carried the same suspicion. Administrators get their fees, everybody else gets nothing.
Baskerville works in the same profession and did not brush it aside, but he set out what the role looks like from inside it. A voluntary administrator becomes personally liable at law the moment they step in. In this case they stepped into a group with almost no liquidity, 350 employees and 45 projects in the construction phase.
He also put a number on the economics that most people outside the profession never see. Across the industry, practitioners write off around 30 per cent of their fees. Roughly a third of the work is never paid for, which is why hourly rates sit well above what an accountant doing compliance work would charge.
Whether there is anything left to pay anyone depends on the lenders. Five of the group’s 43 lenders agreed a short term funding line on 7 September, which kept work going on their own projects and left everything else suspended. About 213 staff were stood down the same day. We reported separately that private credit funds restricting redemptions had already tightened construction lending before the administration began.
“The administrator is not the cause of the situation. They’re the result of the situation.”
Concentration risk is the number that decides who survives
The most useful part of the conversation had nothing to do with Bathla’s balance sheet.
Baskerville’s working rule is that any single customer supplying more than 25 per cent of revenue is a high risk position. Past that point, one collapse upstream takes the business with it, regardless of how well that business was run.
He was direct about who that catches.
“For no fault of the person trying to do the right thing, they’re falling over.”
His description of what happens next is unglamorous. The exposed amount gets written out of the forecast rather than hoped for. Cash already in the business gets identified, other debtors get chased, and outflows get held back while the gap is measured. It is watching cash in and cash out week by week, which he acknowledged is not something most trade businesses have set up before they need it.
Administration and liquidation are not the same thing
A voluntary administrator is appointed to hold and preserve a business while creditors decide its future. Their investigations are preliminary. A liquidator winds the company up and carries stronger powers, including the ability to claw money back and enforce recovery on behalf of creditors. The deep investigation into where money went belongs to a liquidator, not an administrator. Creditors decide which of the two applies at the second meeting of creditors.
Tracing money out of the group is a liquidator’s job, not an administrator’s
Two questions asked whether money moved to related parties before the collapse could be recovered.
Baskerville said the tools exist. Practitioners can require banks to identify the accounts money landed in, and can go further with the assistance of the court. Public examinations allow summonses for documents and cross examination of witnesses under oath. Related parties are where the investigation usually starts.
The qualification is time. Every one of those steps runs through a legal process that unfolds over years, and none of it is available to an administrator conducting preliminary investigations. Anyone waiting on that answer is waiting on a stage of the process that has not begun.
The second meeting of creditors decides which of three outcomes applies
Baskerville described the second meeting as the moment that matters, and the statutory report issued about a week beforehand as the document worth reading.
Creditors choose between three outcomes. The company is handed back to its directors. A deed of company arrangement restructures its affairs, which may include selling parts of the business to return something to creditors. Or the company is wound up.
On recovery rates, he pointed to ASIC data indicating around 90 per cent of companies that go into liquidation return nothing to unsecured creditors, against roughly two thirds of deeds of company arrangement returning something. How much remains unknown until the report lands.
An administrator would ordinarily report to creditors within about four weeks of appointment unless that period is extended by court order. Baskerville expects an extension here, given the size of the group and the number of entities involved.
Nothing obliges a replacement builder to keep the existing trades
One question asked what happens to subcontractors on projects that are taken over by someone else.
There is no obligation to carry existing trades across. Baskerville said a new builder arriving on a group of part built projects will usually bring its own preferred subcontractors, and that no one is likely to be tapped on the shoulder when the handover happens.
He also noted the practical counterweight. Where a trade holds compliance certification partway through a job, keeping that trade on is the path of least resistance for whoever takes over. That is a function of how subcontract arrangements are structured rather than any protection in the legislation.
What the Carillion pattern suggests about the shape of the fallout
Baskerville has been drawing a comparison between Bathla and Carillion, the UK contractor that failed in 2018. His interest is in the timing of the fallout rather than the collapse itself.
His analysis of the Carillion aftermath, drawn from the UK parliamentary inquiry and the academic work that followed, puts the first trade supplier failure within 24 hours of the collapse, five major suppliers inside four weeks, and the bulk of the damage across the following 12 to 18 months. On his reading, a construction sector already running above its average insolvency rate absorbed a further significant uplift attributable to that single failure.
Every collapse is its own animal and he was careful to say so. But the pattern he is pointing at is a supply chain that fails in sequence rather than all at once, which is what makes the next 18 months, rather than the next fortnight, the period worth watching in the wider run of construction insolvencies.
The questions we received were about money. The answer running underneath them all is about sequence. Pre appointment debt sits behind post appointment debt. Preliminary investigation sits ahead of any recovery power. The report sits ahead of the vote. And the vote sits ahead of anyone knowing what, if anything, comes back.
Frequently asked questions
It becomes a claim against the company rather than a bill the administrators are obliged to pay. Unsecured creditors, which is where trade contractors and suppliers sit, rank behind secured lenders and employees. Preliminary figures put to creditors on 4 September show about $130 million owed to unsecured creditors across the group.
Where an administrator engages a subcontractor after appointment, the administrator is personally liable at law for that debt. Baskerville notes the engagement needs to be in writing and signed by the administrator. Work carried out before appointment does not attract that liability.
An administrator holds and preserves the business while creditors decide its future, and conducts preliminary investigations only. A liquidator winds the company up and holds stronger recovery powers, including the ability to claw money back and enforce it on behalf of creditors. Tracing money out of a group is a liquidator function.
The statutory report to creditors, issued about a week before the second meeting of creditors, is the document that sets out estimated returns under each scenario. An administrator would ordinarily report within about four weeks of appointment, but that period can be extended by court order. Baskerville expects an extension given the size of the group.
Baskerville points to ASIC data indicating around 90 per cent of companies entering liquidation return nothing to unsecured creditors. Where a deed of company arrangement is agreed instead, he says roughly two thirds return something to the creditor body, although the amount varies case by case.
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- The Corporate Insolvency Inquiry Finally Has a Government Response
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Last updated 14 September 2026. Figures cited are preliminary and were described as such by the administrators at the first meeting of creditors on 4 September 2026. This is a live administration and positions may have changed since publication.
General information only. This article reports commentary made on The Good Builder Podcast and publicly reported figures. It does not take into account the circumstances of any particular business and is not legal, financial or insolvency advice. Anyone affected by a collapse should obtain their own professional advice.
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