Re Ian Lewis Hunt Ex Parte: Credit Corp Australia Ltd [1990] FCA 539 (28 December 1990)

FEDERAL COURT OF AUSTRALIA

Re: IAN LEWIS HUNT
Ex Parte: CREDIT CORP AUSTRALIA LTD
No. W 2270 of 1990
FED No. 789

COURT

IN THE FEDERAL COURT OF AUSTRALIA
GENERAL DIVISION
BANKRUPTCY DISTRICT OF THE STATE OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Einfeld J.(1)

HEARING

SYDNEY
28:12:1990

DECISION

This is quite a remarkable piece of litigation. It is an application by a bankrupt, Ian Lewis Hunt, for annulment of a sequestration order which was made only a month ago on 27 November 1990. It was then made without any opposition but even the circumstances of its making are odd. The annulment application is brought under section 154(1)(a) of the Bankruptcy Act, namely that it ought not to have been made, based on the bankrupt's allegation that neither the bankruptcy notice nor the creditor's petition was served. They are alleged to have been respectively served on 17 January and 27 August 1990.

2. The applicant for annulment seems to have had the most enormous difficulty with even obtaining legal representation. Despite being a solicitor himself, in practice at Hornsby, it appears that in the short period between 13 November 1990 and the present time he has had no less than four solicitors supposedly attempting to represent his interests. The first of those, whose practice was at Chatswood, was given instructions by facsimile on 13 November to attend this court on 14 November to which date the bankruptcy petition had been at that time most recently adjourned.

3. Its history was that it was first listed in the court on 11 October 1990 on which date it was adjourned on the application of the petitioning creditor to 18 October. On that date and again on 1 November it was further adjourned on the application of the petitioning creditor. On each of those three dates the bankrupt was not present or represented and the petitioning creditor's solicitor was ordered by the deputy registrar to notify the debtor of the adjournment. It seems to be admitted that on the first occasion this notification did not take place. Certainly no evidence has been produced on behalf of the creditor that Mr Hunt was notified of the first adjournment.

4. A copy letter was produced from the petitioning creditor's solicitor (Mr Cassim) to Mr Hunt of 18 October 1990 which purported to inform him of the second adjournment to 1 November. Although vague, this mentions level 18 of the Federal Court and has the additional sentence:
Please be advised that an order for sequestration against

your estate may be made in your absence.

5. Mr Hunt does not recall and therefore does not admit to having received this letter, and no evidence was called that it was in fact despatched although it should have been quite easily available. The document actually produced is in fact a photocopy and not even a complete photocopy at that. I dismiss this document from attention. I doubt that it was sent.

6. On the third occasion which is the one immediately prior to the hearing on 14 November, it is admitted that the bankrupt received notification by a letter of 2 November from Mr Cassim. It was addressed to the debtor at an address which is apparently not accurate but it reached him nevertheless. The letter said:

re: Credit Corp Australia Proprietary Limited
We advise that this matter has now been adjourned to 14
November 1990 for hearing

- all that I have read so far is in typeface - and then there is in handwriting:

Queens Square, Sydney at 9.15 am.

7. It must immediately be said that in the light of the fact that the petitioning creditor's solicitor had not notified the debtor of the previous adjournments, that is a letter which in itself is so sparing of words as to be almost meaningless. It does not identify "this matter". It does not tell him in which court the matter is being heard or even what the matter is. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that at that time, the solicitor for the petitioning creditor was in possession of two affidavits from different process servers who said that they had respectively served the debtor with the bankruptcy notice, the creditor's petition and other supporting material. At least to some extent, therefore, Mr Cassim might have assumed that the debtor would have understood what the letter was about.

8. As it happens, the bankrupt says that none of these documents were served on him. He says that when he received the 2 November letter from Mr Cassim, he did not know what it was about. His method of ascertaining what it was referring to when it spoke of "this matter" involving Credit Corp was first of all to telephone the registry of the Supreme Court of New South Wales where he asked an unknown clerk to ascertain whether there was a matter in the court list on 14 November involving Credit Corp Australia Pty Limited. The clerk said he would call back and did so subsequently to advise that there was no matter in the Supreme Court on 14 November with that company as a litigant.

9. If this account is to be believed, it is interesting to contemplate what would have happened if Credit Corp had in fact been a litigant in a Supreme Court action on that day which had nothing to do with this case. As the facts will show, in the light of what actually happened, Mr Hunt would apparently then have sent his solicitor to the Supreme Court to deal with a matter involving Credit Corp about which he knew absolutely nothing and in which his office would have had no interest.

10. He says that after finding out from the Supreme Court clerk that there was no matter in the list that day, he then telephoned this court. He says that on 13 November he was advised by someone in the registry here that there was a matter in the list on 14 November involving Credit Corp and someone named Hunt. Again if Mr Hunt is to be believed, he was not advised at this time that the matter was in the bankruptcy list and he did not know that the party named Hunt was himself. It does not particularly overstate the efficiency of registry staff to say that it is extremely unlikely that anybody who had gone to the trouble of searching the list for 14 November for a matter involving Credit Corp would not, when calling back, at least have advised Mr Hunt that the matter identified was in the bankruptcy list.

11. It is virtually beyond belief that the name Hunt having been mentioned, this bankrupt did not recognise as himself the individual litigant or at least make further enquiries to ascertain if it was. Moreover, surely he would have inquired what type of case he was about to face. Yet amazingly enough, a contemporaneous facsimile note of instructions sent by Mr Hunt to his then solicitor on 13 November, the same day he says he heard from the court about the matter involving someone bearing his name, referred to two matters with numbers representing the file numbers in two District Court proceedings involving himself, one of which had formed the judgment on which the petition for his bankruptcy was based. The other matter was apparently related. In this facsimile transmission Mr Hunt instructed the solicitor to attend, as the agent of Mr Hunt's firm, at Queens Square for what he called "the defendants" on 14 November at 9.15 a.m. He added the letters "F/H?" which lawyers would generally interpret as suggesting that the matter might have been fixed for hearing.

12. In an accompanying note on 13 November, Mr Hunt referred again only to the District Court proceedings and made no mention of anything to do with the Federal Court at all or with bankruptcy. His instructions to the solicitor were that he wanted "a stay of all proceedings, judgment to be set aside in the District Court and the plaintiff to be put to strict proof of its allegations". It is obvious that Mr Hunt must have known by this time that the proceedings before the court on 14 November involved himself. Why he denied or was equivocal about that knowledge in evidence is a mystery to me. It is not particularly commendable.

13. I agree with the bankrupt's own counsel that that document is either a shrewd ploy or it is amazingly incompetent. The shrewdness would have been in attempting to hide from his own solicitor his knowledge that it was the bankruptcy court that the solicitor had to attend to deal with a bankruptcy notice and creditor's petition involving Mr Hunt personally, already received by him but for some reason not given to his solicitor as part of his instructions. This is more than shrewd: it would be rather a high level of fraud on his own solicitor. It is hard to imagine what could possibly have motivated the bankrupt to try to set up an ignorance of his own bankruptcy proceedings by such a ruse. I am inclined to the incompetency option.

14. It turns out that when the solicitor to whom the facsimile instructions were sent was unable to attend the proceedings on 14 November for one reason or another, he seems to have taken it upon himself to select another firm of solicitors to attend the proceedings on Mr Hunt's behalf. I say "Mr Hunt", although it appears that the judgment in the District Court was not only obtained against him. In any event, a solicitor named Melbourne of the city firm of Dupree, Moore and Associates, attended the court on 14 November, apparently on these third party instructions. This in itself is an oddity. It seems strange that one solicitor who is operating at Chatswood would instruct a solicitor in Macquarie Street, Sydney to attend court on behalf of a solicitor at Hornsby without first notifying the client that he was passing on the instructions to someone else or asking whether this was in order. However, it seems to have happened, and Ms Melbourne attended court on 14 November when the matter was listed before the registrar in bankruptcy. The information she held about the matter did not bode well for the efficient conduct of what was being put to her as a possibly contested hearing.

15. Once again there are extraordinary anomalies. Ms Melbourne reported on the proceedings of 14 November to the Chatswood solicitor from whom she had received her instructions, by letter dated 15 November which appears to have been faxed on that day. Perhaps it is the original letter which was posted, but what appears to be a copy of the fax exhibited to me bears a receipt stamp of 19 November, on which date the 15 November letter appears to have first found its way to Mr Hunt. On the evidence before me from Mr Hunt personally, this appears to have been the first knowledge that Mr Hunt had of what occurred on 14 November and where it occurred, including that his representative at court on that date was not the man he had instructed but Ms Melbourne. Five important days seem to have been lost in masterly inactivity on a matter of great importance to Mr Hunt. There is no evidence that a single phone call was made to ascertain what had happened at court, despite the fact that Mr Hunt might have been, or been about to be, made bankrupt.

16. Were it not for the fact that Ms Melbourne's letter had as its second paragraph,

We further confirm that we obtained Mr Hunt's number
directly and received direct instructions from him.

17. I would not know that on 14 November Ms Melbourne had obtained personal instructions from Mr Hunt about what she was to do at court on that day. If she had merely been supplied with the fax from Mr Hunt of 13 November to which I have earlier referred, she would not have had the slightest idea what to say to the court on 14 November, still less whether any and if so what preparation would have been needed. She would not have known that she was going to be appearing before a registrar in bankruptcy and that the types of things which Mr Hunt sought in his fax would not have been available in such proceedings. The stay of proceedings could possibly have been granted by a judge on that day, but the other matters he was seeking could not have been dealt with in the Bankruptcy Court at all.

18. In his evidence Mr Hunt was strangely not at all sure about his dealings with Ms Melbourne including whether he spoke to her before or after the court proceedings on November 14. Apart from her letter after the hearing, I think that Ms Melbourne must have spoken to Mr Hunt before she agreed to anything on 14 November. I say that because there was filed in court on that day a form that is officially headed "Notice of Intention of Debtor to Appear at Hearing of Petition". That, if I may say so, seems to be a generally misleading heading for the document's purpose and should really be changed. It is really a "Notice of Opposition to the Petition". This particular document has a number at the top, which is the number of the case in the list of the registrar. It is apparently signed by Ms Melbourne, and it states as the grounds of opposition to the petition, "Disputed service of bankruptcy notice and creditor's petition and disputed debt."

19. It is possible that Ms Melbourne might have known from the information in Mr Hunt's fax of 13 November, that the debt was disputed but she could not have known from that communication that the services of both the bankruptcy notice and the creditor's petition were disputed. As the Chatswood solicitor could, on the evidence before me, also not have known of this dispute, it seems beyond doubt that Ms Melbourne must have spoken to Mr Hunt prior to the finality of the proceedings before the registrar on 14 November and discovered that his opposition to his own bankruptcy was based upon the matters that Ms Melbourne set out in the notice which was filed with the court that day. If he did not know beforehand, as he says was the position, Ms Melbourne must also have informed Mr Hunt that he was in the bankruptcy court about to be made bankrupt.

20. It seems odd that Mr Hunt should have been equivocal about his dealings with Ms Melbourne in these regards. It is only five weeks ago or so since these events and the events are not unimportant to Mr Hunt, and yet he seemed to be to-ing and fro-ing about whether he spoke to Ms Melbourne at all, whether he spoke to her before the hearing or after the hearing, what was said if there was a conversation, and whether he gave her any instructions at all. To me this is incomprehensible and throws significant doubt on his credibility.

21. Mr Hunt answers that he has had a lot of worries in recent times since the bankruptcy, which I certainly accept, and that he has had a lot of things on his mind, but this after all was his bankruptcy. Adding his account of earlier events to Ms Melbourne's letter, he would have found out about it for the first time on the morning of 14 November when Ms Melbourne contacted him, presumably speaking from the court or from her office down the street, and told him that Credit Corp was seeking to make him bankrupt on that very day. The court's record of proceedings shows that notwithstanding Ms Melbourne's opposition, the petitioning creditor was seeking a sequestration order. Yet Mr Hunt "cannot recall" receiving this information from Ms Melbourne at all.

22. Apart from the filing of the notice of opposition to the petition, Ms Melbourne also signed short minutes of orders on 14 November which the registrar duly made. These were that the matter be adjourned to 27 November, that the debtor file and serve any affidavits by 21 November, that any evidence in reply be filed and served by 26 November, and that costs be reserved. Although there is absolutely no evidence about the matter at all, it is not conceivable that Ms Melbourne would have agreed to orders of this kind without first obtaining Mr Hunt's specific instructions about and agreement to them. After all, on the evidence she had never met Mr Hunt and had been plucked from "the reserve bench" to appear for him anyway on that day.

23. Mr Hunt's evidence is again at best unsatisfactory on these matters. However, it is not disputed that Mr Hunt knew about the events at the 14 November hearing and his imminent bankruptcy on 19 November at the latest because on that day he wrote a letter to Ms Melbourne in reply to her report to the Chatswood solicitor of 15 November. Thus on 19 November, facing a bankruptcy petition on the 27th, Mr Hunt seems to have done little or nothing other than to acknowledge receipt of Ms Melbourne's letter and to say that

... the matter to be dealt with in priority is the
preparation of affidavit material on behalf of the judgment
debtor and for such material to be filed and served by
Wednesday of this week.

24. In fact, from the time of the hearing, as counsel for the petitioning creditor correctly pointed out, virtually nothing happened in the matter. No affidavit was prepared by or on behalf of Mr Hunt until the one relied upon in the proceedings before me dated 21 December 1990.

25. The evidence shows that Ms Melbourne told Mr Hunt by return fax of 19 November that her firm would be unable to handle the matter on 27 November because of the shortness of time. Mr Hunt then gave telephone instructions to a firm called Gordon, Garling and Giugni somewhere close to the hearing on 27 November. These instructions were confirmed by letter of 29 November (2 days after the hearing) in which Mr Hunt gave a lengthy exposition about aspects of the history of the case, but told the recipient nothing about what the dispute over the debt was. In fact he claimed to the new solicitor that he did not know or had never been told what the amount in dispute was. Yet his fax to the earlier solicitor had drawn attention to the two District Court judgments. He also pointed out another of the strange things in this case, namely that the claim seems to have arisen in 1982 and yet was not sued for until 1989. There is no explanation before me about that matter at all and I am quite unable to draw any serious conclusion as to the delay. I can merely add it to the amazing panoply of weirdnesses that seem to have invaded and infected this litigation.

26. As to the bankruptcy proceedings, Mr Hunt's letter of instructions to his new solicitors on 29 November merely says:

... the plaintiff appears to have thereafter commenced
proceedings in the bankruptcy jurisdiction and it is our
submission that it was improper for such proceedings to have
been commenced in the first instance.

27. How it was "improper" is not stated. What is peculiar, I interpolate, is that at no time in any of his correspondence to his solicitors does he ever seem to acknowledge that he himself is a litigant in these proceedings. Nor is there any reference to his not having been served with a bankruptcy notice or a petition or even to not knowing until November 14 that there was a bankruptcy case in existence at all.

28. The inferences to be placed on that saga are given some underlining by counsel for the petitioning creditor by reference to the statement of affairs filed by the bankrupt on 19 December 1990. He alleges, apparently without challenge or dispute, that in that statement, Mr Hunt has omitted reference to at least one major liability and that the document has some other defects which a solicitor in particular ought to know was required to have been properly disclosed. The conclusion which I am asked to draw by the petitioning creditor is that the bankrupt's explanations and disavowals concerning the services of the bankruptcy notice and creditor's petition ought to be rejected. It is suggested that I should conclude that the bankrupt is a liar who has not the slightest intention of telling the truth in any relevant respect. In this regard, evidence was tendered to establish that Mr Hunt's suggestion that he does not owe this debt is absurd. Some letters going back to March and April 1983 - written by the way by solicitors who were then acting for Mr Hunt - are presented to establish in effect an acknowledgment of the debt and the making of arrangements for payment.

29. Some other correspondence was presented, and which after objection I admitted on a limited basis only, to show that Mr Hunt was in fact informed, directly and indirectly, of upcoming or intended bankruptcy proceedings prior to their launching by a number of letters in June and July 1990. Mr Hunt said in evidence that he had not received any of these letters and it is true, as his counsel has correctly said, that they have not been proved to have actually been sent. On a matter such as this, I do not think that I should accept, merely on photocopies of copies, that the letters ever left the offices to which they appear to have been sourced. In that sense, as a question of admissibility of evidence, counsel for the bankrupt is correct.

30. But the letters deserve a little attention, nevertheless, from a different standpoint. The first in point of time is dated 25 June 1990 and appears to be from Citicorp to Mr Hunt, not quite correctly addressed, but sufficiently well addressed to be likely to have reached him if it had been sent. It is effectively a demand for the payment of the moneys obtained under the two District Court judgments to which I have referred. Interestingly enough the amount of the debts is not stated, despite the fact that the demand is in terms said to be issued pursuant to section 12 of the New South Wales Conveyancing Act. I am not quite sure what that reference adds to the letter but it is odd that although it appears to be a letter of demand, it is in a strange form, it does not say how much was owing, and makes no reference to a bankruptcy notice allegedly served five months earlier.

31. The following day a letter is said to have been sent to Mr Hunt at the same address from Credit Corp Australia Pty Limited. It says that Credit Corp are the assignees of the judgments obtained by Citicorp and that notice of the judgments had been given to them by the assignor on 25 June. It does say how much money was alleged to be owing and also refers for the first time to the bankruptcy notice.

32. These letters themselves produce another oddity. If their contents are true, unless the assignment was signed on 25 June, then the debt was not due to Citicorp by Mr Hunt on that day but would have been due to Credit Corp. Although the letter of Citicorp does say that an acknowledgment from Credit Corp Australia would be a sufficient discharge of the debt, if the debt was assigned on or about 25 June, it is strange that Citicorp would have been asking him to pay the debt to it when at the time it would have been paid, it was supposed to be payable to Credit Corp.

33. I must confess that if the Citicorp letter was sent, and was, as it apparently would have been, the first indication to Mr Hunt of the assignment, it seems most peculiarly and inappropriately phrased. So much is this the case that if I had to rule in the matter, I would have been inclined to accept Mr Hunt's denial of its receipt on the basis that it probably was never sent, although this would raise another query as to how Mr Hunt knew that Credit Corp was pursuing him for debts he would have thought were owed to Citicorp and that the District Court judgments referred to in his fax of 13 November were the background of the "matter" to which Mr Cassim's 2 November notification of the new hearing date referred.

34. The despatch of the Credit Corp letter of 26 June is thrown into doubt by the suggested existence of another letter, dated 10 July, from Credit Corp to Mr Hunt at the same not quite correct address. This again informed him that they were the assignees of a judgment against him by Citicorp, contained the same first two paragraphs as the supposed letter of 26 June despite making no reference to that letter, and said that a bankruptcy petition was in the process of being issued. If the letter of 26 June was sent, I cannot imagine that the one of 10 July would have been in the terms in which it appears.

35. This saga of tragi-comedy goes on, because on the same 10 July, Mr Hunt is said to have been sent a letter by Citicorp telling him again that the debt had been assigned, again quoting section 12 of the Conveyancing Act, and again telling him about the acknowledgment of Credit Corp being satisfactory. In other words, two letters are supposedly sent on 10 July in virtually identical terms to those of 25 and 26 June but making no reference to them.

36. The documents produced to me are not the originals of the letters in any event, but are merely photocopies of copies produced by counsel from his brief. The decision by the petitioning creditor to allow this matter to proceed today without calling any evidence in relation to these letters, despite the challenge to them, must tell against their admission or diminish the attention which I should give to their substantive terms if they are admitted. There must be some considerable doubt that these letters were ever sent. In the absence of any evidence being called to support their despatch, I therefore rule that they are not admissible as evidence that the bankrupt was informed of the facts, demands and statements in them.

37. As I have earlier noted, the affidavits of service filed in the proceedings for a sequestration order state that the bankruptcy notice was served on 17 January 1990 and the creditor's petition on 27 August 1990, both in his office. Mr Hunt produced an extract from his diary which is relied upon to show, in corroboration of his sworn denial of having been served, that on 27 August, he was not in his office at all. The diary extract for 17 January 1990 does not take the matter anywhere because he was in his office and it is possible that he was served.

38. Although notice was given for the attendance at this hearing of the deponents of the two affidavits of service, they have not been able to be contacted in the time and neither party has asked for an adjournment to hear their evidence at some time when they might be available. Having regard to the time of the year and the short notice of these proceedings, it is not surprising that they have not been obtainable, but it is for the party relying on the truth of their evidence to bear the consequences of proceeding in their absence. On a vital contested issue of fact of this kind, I should not give undue weight to the affidavits themselves although I do agree with counsel for the petitioning creditor that it would be truly extraordinary if two quite separate deponents were both telling lies about the two distinct services. However, this case is so full of extraordinary happenings that although counsel asks for some type of prima facie finding that their evidence should be accepted, I think I should just take the affidavits into account rather than give them any special evidentiary weight one way or the other.

39. The matter comes before the court in vacation as an urgent matter and that is the reason why I have taken to giving this judgment ex tempore at this time. The urgency is said to be that the bankrupt's office as a solicitor is closed until 7 January 1991. If it re-opens then, with only him in charge, he would be committing offences under the Bankruptcy Act by operating his trust account, by paying cheques and by operating bank accounts and so on unless his bankruptcy was annulled. The cost and problem of hiring a locum or making other arrangements with the trustee and others for the continuation of the practice would certainly be considerable.

40. There is even greater urgency, it is said, because he must now sign cheques to pay the staff their holiday pay and do other perhaps more mechanical matters to keep his practice in existence. Although all these circumstances have existed since 27 November, and whilst I think that satisfactory arrangements could be made to ensure that he did not commit any offences under the Bankruptcy Act whilst preserving the position of the clients and staff and other people with whom the practice must deal, I accept that the matter does have urgency and ought to be disposed of.

41. It is not an easy matter to resolve. There is much in the criticism of the bankrupt made by the petitioning creditor and there is no doubt that his conduct and responses to the undisputed events raise many questions and many doubts. I am really asked to accept that he did not accept the urgency of the situation in which he found himself; that he did not properly appreciate that he was facing bankruptcy and what was required to try to stave off or defeat the petition; and that when made bankrupt, he was so overwhelmed that he did not comprehend what he had to do urgently to try to redress what he claimed to be an injustice even in the form of obtaining advice and representation. He has been in practice for a number of years and has been in his present place of sole practice for five years.

42. I accept his counsel's suggestion that many suburban solicitors may not have to engage in the type of litigation that involves urgency and threats to people's status, livelihoods, liberties, freedoms and interests in quite the same way as solicitors in the city might do, but it is very difficult indeed to accept that any solicitor would take a casual attitude to his own bankruptcy. Every law student would know that bankruptcy carries very serious repercussions. Once Mr Hunt knew that he was a litigant in the bankruptcy court, he must have had an idea that the matter was enormously threatening to his future survival in practice.

43. It is really stretching the imagination beyond reasonable capacity to accept that even a lay person, let alone a solicitor, once informed that he was on the receiving end of a creditor's petition, would not react with expedition, concern and attention and would indulge in writing letters in place of actually doing something to right the alleged wrong. What is perhaps one the great oddities of all is how difficult it seems to have been for him to obtain somebody to act for him for more than about half an hour at a time, and how inattentive he was to the need to obtain expert and experienced advice and representation. Yet all this happened in this one case.

44. For the reasons I have given, it is difficult to resolve the truth concerning the service or non-service of the documents. I have had sworn written evidence of both and some verbal evidence from Mr Hunt. I accept that the evidence of Mr Hunt is in many respects unsatisfactory but I do not think that a fax in the form of his of 13 November could have been written by someone who had in fact received the bankruptcy documentation unless he was deliberately determined to mislead and not co-operate with his own lawyer. I have not been able to think of a motive to explain extraordinary behaviour of that kind. It surely cannot have been to set up the present dilemma. I simply cannot conceive of a reason why that fax would be in that form if Mr Hunt had received the bankruptcy documents unless he was a talented cheat and a highly trained tactician with acutely honed skills at brinkmanship. Whatever other conclusions I can draw from the material put in evidence in this difficult case, I have not drawn the conclusion that such assessments of Mr Hunt are warranted.

45. I take into account that, like any sole entrepreneur, or professional or commercial operator, a solicitor in sole practice would effectively have to cease practising upon being made bankrupt and his clients would all have to take their affairs elsewhere and the staff find other employment at very short notice. I therefore conclude that what should happen in this case is that the petition should be reheard and the issue of service properly litigated with all the witnesses present and available for cross-examination. That is the procedure our system of justice establishes for the resolution of issues of fact of this kind and I think that it would be unwise to allow a bankruptcy to stand when a factual dispute of such a serious kind has been left in the unsatisfactory and unresolved state existing in this case.

46. I make no comment at all about the suggested question of the existence of the debt. No serious material of substance has been put before me which would establish that there was a doubt about the debts for which judgments have been obtained in the District Court. All that has been presented to the court so far is a very summary account - in four paragraphs - of Mr Hunt's association with the assignors of the present petitioning creditor back in 1983. That material does not throw such doubt on the existence of the debts for which judgment has been obtained as to warrant this court in accordance with existing authority going behind the judgment at this time. That is not to say that such material might not be available. I merely say that on the present information before me, I can make no comment about the existence or otherwise of grounds to attack the judgment debt on which the bankruptcy notice is based. Therefore the debts stand at the present time as judgments of the District Court on which no doubt has as yet been thrown so as to suggest that they ought not to be available for enforcement in the usual way.

47. For the reasons given, I make the finding that the sequestration order ought not to have been made and that the bankruptcy should be annulled. I will adjourn to enable counsel to prepare short minutes of appropriate orders to give effect to that conclusion and to the course which should now be adopted in order to enable the petition to be reheard.