Things just keep going from bad to worse for George Calombaris.
WATCH: Sam Armytage takes a savage swipe at George Calombaris
Not only has the 41-year-old former MasterChef judge, who was charged with assault in 2017, seemingly lost everything, but he has been slammed online since news broke that the hospitality empire he founded, MAdE Establishment, has been placed into voluntary administration.
The news of the collapse of MAdE comes just months after the company admitted to underpaying $7.83 million in wages to 515 of its current and former employees.
Many blamed Calombaris personally for the accounting mishap, with punters also pinning last week’s news of the immediate closure of 12 venues and loss of more than 400 jobs on the celebrity chef.
“That’s what happens when you rip people off,” one Facebook user commented shortly after the announcement.
As the very public face of the business, Calombaris unsurprisingly copped the brunt of the blame for the fall of the 12 venues, and it seems he and wife Natalie Tricarico will also take a personal financial hit after they listed their Toorak home and Safety Beach holiday property for sale.
With his role as a judge on MasterChef no
longer, things couldn’t look much worse for Calombaris’ future.
But insolvency expert Jeremy Nipps, a liquidator and partner of Cor Cordis, suggests this won’t be the end of the Melbourne restaurateur’s career.
“He can go and open up another restaurant if he wanted to, there’s no preventing him,” Nipps explains exclusively to WHO. “There’s no stopping a director of a company from recommencing a business. He would be able to do that. The law allows that. There’s no stopping that.”
Unlike personal bankruptcy, MAdE Establishment going into voluntary the administration will not affect Calombaris’ personal ability to start again.
According to Nipps, the reason why the father of two is selling personal assets
is that they are likely tied to loans associated with the business.
“I don’t know what the structuring of the company is but generally what we see a lot of the time in the director’s personal financial position is inextricably linked to the business itself,” he says.
“Generally, personal assets have been pledged to support funding or whatever else the bank has helped fund in the form of a loan. There are very often situations where a director’s house has been used as security to allow the business to be funded.
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