Plain sailing for Palmer
COLOURFUL businessman Clive Palmer has shrugged off criminal charges and joined a group of family and friends on another luxury cruise around the Mediterranean.
Mr Palmer, his wife Anna, their two young daughters, and other relatives have spent the past seven days cruising around Italy, France and Spain on the Norwegian Epic.
Mr Palmer’s Bulgarian father-in-law Alexander Sokolov also joined them, but there was no sign of Mr Palmer’s runaway nephew Clive Mensink, who left Australia in 2016 when the Palmer-owned Queensland Nickel refinery went bust, throwing almost 800 people out of work.
The Norwegian Epic — one of the largest cruise ships in the world when it was launched eight years ago — features a water-slide, several pools, and enormous staterooms for its most valued guests. It departed Civitavecchia, the port near Rome, on May 2. Seven-day cruises cost up to $3500.
The family also spent 24 days cruising the Mediterranean last year, as Mr Palmer faced questions in the Federal Court over the collapse of the Townsville-based Queensland Nickel.
Liquidators are probing whether money was diverted from Queensland Nickel to prop up Mr Palmer’s now-failed political party, the Palmer United Party. The company collapsed under $300 million of debt and taxpayers forked out to cover workers’ entitlements.
Mr Palmer did not answer calls or respond to text messages from News Corp.
Mr Palmer was last month charged by the corporate regulator ASIC with one count of aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring the commission of an offence by another person.
The charge alleged Mr Palmer announced a proposal in 2012 to buy shares of another company that owned properties in his troubled resort at Coolum, but failed to follow through with his proposal within two months, as required by law.
He has denied any wrongdoing and dismissed the charges as baseless, politicallymotivated, and doomed to fail.
In separate proceedings, two warrants have been issued for Mr Mensink, Queensland’s Nickel sole director, to answer questions about the company’s collapse.
News Corp tracked him down in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia in February, where he lives with his Bulgarian girlfriend and continues to receive a $4000 weekly wage from one of Mr Palmer’s companies.