Debt pile revealed in new filing for collapsed | Australian Markets
Jeanswest had simply $13 million in belongings to cowl about $53m of money owed when it collapsed for the second time final month.
New filings additionally reveal that the 90-store national retailer owes $4.1m to its 600 employees and is sitting on almost $776,000 in unclaimed reward vouchers.
Jeanswest’s Hong Kong backers appointed insolvency specialists from Pitcher Partners as directors of the chain 4 weeks in the past, the 53-year-old model changing into one other sufferer of cost-of-living pressures and altering retail trends which can be making it tough for bricks-and-mortar retailers to show a revenue.
The directors are exploring a rescue that may see Jeanswest proceed on as an online-only business.
According to creditor claims included in an replace filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Harbour Guidance Pty Ltd — the Australian holding company that was put below — owed about $53m when Pitcher Partners was referred to as in, together with $4.1m in redundancy entitlements and unpaid go away.
Harbour Guidance, linked to clothes and textiles mogul Chun Fan Yeung, has owned Jeanswest because it first fell into administration at first of the pandemic in 2020. Mr Yeung was beforehand concerned with the retailer by way of a company that purchased Jeanswest in 2017 in a associated social gathering deal from the Hong Kong-listed Glorious Sun Enterprise.
According to the filings, most of the $53m Jeanswest debt — about $45m — is claimed by two Australian and Hong Kong firms related to Mr Yeung.
The Australian Tax Office is owed $122,000.
Almost all of the estimated $13m in belongings listed in the replace was made up of stock and store fixtures and fittings.
Pitcher Partners has been fast to dump Jeanswest’s stock, nearly instantly launching a profitable clearance sale that offloaded 160,000 gadgets, together with 53,000 pairs of denims, in simply two weeks.
Mr Yeung helped pull Jeanswest — based in Perth in 1972 — back from the brink after the 2020 collapse however he has struggled to revive the model’s gross sales amid more and more powerful competitors from online retailers.
Pitcher Partners’ lead administrator, Lindsay Bainbridge, mentioned on the time of his firm’s appointment that the homeowners had “fought for five years to revive (Jeanswest) but had concluded it was time to step back from physical stores to focus on online retail”.
Jeanswest was based by high-flying WA entrepreneur Alister Norwood, who opened the primary Jeanswest store in Perth in 1972. The business expanded to the east coast earlier than Mr Norwood offered up in the Nineteen Nineties after key suppliers, together with Levi Strauss and Faberge, stopped delivering stock as a result of of mounting money owed.
It was purchased in 1994 by Glorious Sun, which expanded the model abroad with shops in Russia, Fiji, Venezuela, Vietnam and China.
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