Jon Adgemis, definitely bankrupt

Nothing happens quickly in Australia's financial system, but it's finally official: former playboy publican Jon Adgemis is an undischarged bankrupt. Honestly, I never thought Sanjeev Gupta would outlast him in the Olympic events of plate-spinning and fast-talking.

Fun fact: at $1.8 billion, Adgemis's personal bankruptcy comes in as the equal largest in Australian history, tied with Alan Bond's in 1992.[[Obviously, Bond's was much larger on an inflation-adjusted basis.]] It is 10 times the size of Christopher Skase's $172 million bankruptcy in 1991.

Adgemis is the poster child for Australia's booming private credit sector. It's only a wonder that Metrics Credit Partners wasn't in Adgemis's debt stack – it could've converted the debt to equity and folded his Public Hospitality Group into Rockpool! 

In April and May of 2023, I spent more than a week buried in the corporate records of Public Hospitality, its properties, its umpteen subsidiaries and a stack of information memoranda circulated by Public's non-bank lenders to their clients. My resulting investigation in the AFR revealed that Public was already carrying at least $500 million of debt ($95 million of which was interest already paid) despite owning assets for which it paid less than $300 million. Eighty per cent of those assets had been purchased in the prior three years.