Greensill’s parent company enters liquidation
Greensill Capital’s Australian business, which collapsed last month with debts of A$4.9bn, has entered liquidation.
Administrator Grant Thornton said creditors had voted by 23 to zero, with a handful of abstentions, to liquidate the parent company of the disgraced supply chain firm.
“As of today, the company is now in liquidation,” Grant Thornton said. “The liquidators will continue to identify and realise available assets, monitor developments in relation to the administrations of Greensill UK and the Greensill Bank AG, and continue their investigations in relation to Greensill Capital Pty Limited in liquidation.”
The liquidation process will see Grant Thornton conduct another review of Greensill’s financial affairs and a report on the conduct of top executives.
It comes after news that prosecutors had raided Greensill’s offices and the homes of board members in Bremen, Germany as part of an investigation into the collapse of the lender.
Greensill’s demise has triggered a wave of investigations in both Germany and the UK.
Concerns over the supply-chain finance firm had been growing for some time which prompted German regulator Bafin to review lending activity at the Bremen-based Greensill Bank before its collapse.
Prosecutors today said it started to raid Greensill’s offices last week before searching the homes of some of the five suspects in the investigation on Tuesday.
“The raid continues as long as we say it continues,” Frank Passade, a spokesman for the prosecutors said. “This gives us the opportunity to get into the bank’s offices whenever we need it.”
Greensill Capital was the brainchild of former Citigroup and Morgan Stanley financier Lex Greensill and received backing from Softbank’s Vision Fund.
It specialised in supply chain finance and claimed to lower costs before grabbing headlines after crashing into insolvency last month.
German towns and cities are scrambling for cash after losing millions, while a group of lenders that runs a deposit insurance is seeking 2bn from Greensill Capital.
In the UK thousands of steel jobs have been put at risk since the supply chain finance firm filed for administration.
GFG Alliance’s main source of funding was Greensill and the firm, run by steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta, said it had no “conceivable” way of meeting a £100m repayment demand.
Former PM David Cameron, an adviser to Greensill, has also become embroiled in the scandal. Last year he sent texts to Chancellor Rishi Sunak in a bid to overturn the Treasury’s decision to deny Greensill Capital access to the government’s Covid Corporate Financing Facility.