Rhodes, Cole named in Great Southern cattle writ
Former Great Southern chief Cameron Rhodes and senior Perth lawyer Steven Cole are among the defendants in a $52 million lawsuit launched by investors in the failed company's cattle schemes.
The investors include former WA premier Brian Burke, whose family company Abbey Lea Pty Ltd is revealed in court documents to have tipped $700,000 into the projects.
In documents filed with the WA Supreme Court this week, lawyers from Perth firm Solomon Brothers allege Great Southern subsidiary Great Southern Managers Australia and GSMA's directors breached their duties to act in the best interests of investors when they pushed through a supposedly company-saving restructure in the months before its collapse.
Mr Rhodes, who has since resigned, was a director of Great Southern and GSMA, which manages the group's 43 managed investment schemes. Mr Cole was the independent chairman of GSMA. Directors Phillip Butlin - Great Southern's chairman - Murray Colvin and Robert Jenkins are also named in the writ.
The restructure involved the winding up of Great Southern's two cattle schemes and the compulsory exchange of interests with now-worthless shares in Great Southern.
About 700 of the schemes' 3500 investors, representing $52 million, have signed up to the legal action.
It is bankrolled by litigation funder IMF.
The action also contains allegations revealed in June that some of the group's directors offered secret incentives to investors to change their votes in favour of the restructure after preliminary voting results suggested the restructure would fail.
"The (defendants), or some of them, offered financial inducements to, and thereby procured that, some scheme members changed their votes from being against to being in favour of the first and second resolutions and other scheme members cancelled their vote against the first and second resolutions," the writ says.
The case is listed for a court hearing next month.
