The announcement that charges against two senior executives of Bruck Textile Technologies Pty Ltd (Bruck Textile) have been dropped by ASIC may reawaken the nightmare for those former employees who had lost their jobs when the assets of Bruck Textile were sold back in 2014.
Bruck Textile was considered insolvent after the sale and placed into liquidation with 58 employees not only losing their jobs but also their redundancy payments and other entitlements they had earned.
For many, their lives would never be the same as they fought to get their hard-earned entitlements, eventually paid out by the federal government as a new business emerged from the collapse, with the same two senior executives involved, and which continues to this day.
A fact one of the executives, former chair Philip Bart, stated had not only saved the business but also another 120 jobs.
While Mr Bart and former chief financial officer Ronald Johnson, in a written statement, said they were pleased that “commonsense had finally prevailed” with the charges against them being dropped, there was no mention of the 58 employees who had lost their jobs and had to go through the federal government to get their just and deserved payouts.
For the wider community, who had in the past shared in the success and failure of the textile industry over so many decades, the episode remains one of the darkest in the rural city’s industrial history.
Hopefully, the end of the court saga will allow those 58 workers and their families to continue to move on with their lives and hopefully understand how dear the community holds them after all they endured.