ASIC reports that it has appointed 60 suitably qualified and experienced liquidators to its Abandoned Company Liquidator Panel, effective from 6 July 2025. This follows the conclusion of the previous Panel’s term, which was in place from July 2018 to July 2025.
ASIC Corporate Insolvency Update – Issue 37 | ASIC
Sixty is a big panel in particular given that ASIC wound up only 8 companies in the 2025 financial year, and 9 the year before. I was going to say this is but a drop in the ocean but am reminded that I said this in 2020-2021, when ASIC wound up 19 such companies, appointing liquidators from a panel of 32: ASIC’s power to wind up abandoned companies – a drop in the ocean? – Murrays Legal
As a recap, under section 489EA of the Corporations Act, ASIC may wind up and appoint a liquidator to abandoned companies to allow the employees of those companies to access their unpaid entitlements under the Fair Entitlements Guarantee Act 2012. Without the appointment of a liquidator, these employees would not be able to do so. The appointments are funded through the Assetless Administration Fund (AAF) and assigned to selected panel members.
The appointed Panel member is required to wind up the company’s affairs, distribute its property and help employees to access any unpaid employee entitlements under the FEG Act.
ASIC explains that this also facilitates a full and proper investigation into the reasons why the company failed and allows recovery of any voidable or unreasonable director-related transactions. How often that happens is not stated.
The reason for this process is that where the company has limited or no assets and has been abandoned by the directors, creditors other than employees may have no incentive to fund the winding up of the company. The government acknowledges the cost of placing a company into liquidation can be prohibitive.
“It is estimated that there are five times as many abandoned companies as there are companies in liquidation each year, but the amounts lost to their creditors are unquantified”.[1]
Hence even more of a drop in the ocean.
The 2023 PJC Report considered this issue and recommended [10] that ASIC
“collect and analyse data from an appropriately sized sample of voluntary and compulsory de-registrations, to provide greater visibility of the solvency status of deregistered companies”.
That has not occurred.
It may be that the numbers of companies wound up by ASIC in 2024-2025 are very high – these are soon to be released, and that anticipated numbers for 2026 are substantially higher again, justifying the 60 appointments?
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[1] Insolvency – it’s all about the money, Helen Anderson, (2018) 46(2) Federal Law Review 287-312; references omitted.
