A $2.2 million house and land package Charles Innes is now selling in Mosman Park in Perth, Western Australia. Photo / Supplied
A $2.2 million house and land package Charles Innes is now selling in Mosman Park in Perth, Western Australia. Photo / Supplied
A businessman is selling $2 million luxury homes just months after two companies he led collapsed, owing $10m and leaving multiple Kiwi families in financial ruin.
The Herald can reveal Charles Innes is now working for Perth-headquartered Webb & Brown-Neaves as a selling agent for house and land packages in the Western Australian city.
Some of the luxury double-storey home builds include 500sq m beachfront blocks with modern open-plan kitchen and living spaces, and boast of daily walks along “crisp white sands” and sunset cocktails “overlooking Perth’s pristine coastline”.
Innes has been summoned to this week fly back to New Zealand to appear in the High Court at Auckland to answer questions about his management of Podular Housing Systems and Sanders Manufacturing.
Podular owes an estimated $9.3m to creditors - a figure that has ballooned from an earlier $5.3m estimate - having failed to deliver finished tiny homes to up to 60 buyers, according to liquidators and a company insider.
Sanders Manufacturing owes about $800,000 after as many as 68 customers likely paid deposits for cabins and sheds they didn’t receive, the liquidator says.
Innes did not wish to provide any comment for this story.
Podular liquidators Gerry Rea Partners said in its recent six-monthly report it continues to “investigate the conduct of the director and officers”.
“The liquidators have sought, and obtained, orders for the director Mr Innes to attend court and be examined before a judge,” it said.
Podular and Sanders’ combined collapse are among the largest failures in the modular home and cabin sector, an industry that is seen by some as a key to helping to ease the housing crisis by building more homes quickly.
The companies advertised they could make homes, cabins, sleepouts and sheds, using modular designs that could supposedly be mass-produced, while also being modifiable to suit the needs of individual customers.
Podular homes director Charles Innes is now selling house and land packages in Perth, Western Australia. Photo / Supplied
One of the Perth homes Charles Innes is selling. Photo / Supplied
The Herald also recently reported that Innes is understood to have been profiting from a third deck and fence-building company in New Zealand, while he was living overseas and while Podular and Sanders were under liquidation.
Innes had at the time been listed as director of a third business, called Ten Four Limited, trading as Fenceadeck.
The Fenceadeck.co.nz website of this third company now displays as “suspended”. But it earlier stated the business can build fences and decks, and claimed it was “a premier timber outdoor specialist”.
Podular liquidators Gerry Rea Partners, meanwhile, recently released a new estimate the company folded while owing $9,288,372 to creditors - a figure almost double the original estimate.
The liquidators said they had actively taken charge of Podular’s assets and were selling them where possible to generate returns to creditors.
That effort had so far yielded $627,856 in returns.
But once costs and fees were taken out of the returns, just $74,047 was left over to pay creditors.
This meant no money is currently left over to pay Podular employees the $356,988 they are owed or the $1,043,887 owed to the Inland Revenue Department.
Podular customers, tradespeople and other unsecured creditors are also unlikely to recover any of the $6.6m owed to them.
However, in what has been coined as precedent-setting in legal circles, 16 Podular customers have recently been given High Court legal backing to claim unfinished tiny homes built for them.
Podular had been building the homes at its factory sites with the intention of then transporting the completed homes to the customers once they were finished.
However, the company went into liquidation before delivering the homes.
Under normal liquidation processes, liquidators are able to take possession of a liquidated company’s assets and sell them to disburse to creditors according to an order of importance.
But in the Podular High Court decision in May and an earlier decision about a separate company in March this year, the judges ruled the 16 customers were able to jump above all other creditors to get rights to the unfinished homes.
In commentary on its website, legal firm Belly Gully said the judges in both cases decided that each of the partially finished homes were “identifiable, could be traced to a purchaser, and could not reasonably be sold to anyone else”.
That is different to spare building supplies on a building site, for instance, that could not yet be directly tied to any individual project and which a liquidator can typically take possession of and sell.
Liquidators Gerry Rea Partners have appealed the decision to the Court of Appeal, however.
