Company roots in previous leaky-building liquidation
Collapsed construction company Ebert has links to another bust building company, which went into voluntary liquidation after a leaky apartment building claim in Wellington.
Trebe NZ, which is Ebert spelt backwards, folded shortly after the release of the critical Hunn report on leaky buildings in 2002.
Trebe was founded in 1992, and for most of its time operating was known as Ebert NZ.
Its sole director when it was liquidated in 2002 was Wellingtonian Kelvin Hale, one of Ebert Construction’s current directors and managing director.
Dennis Ebert, who started Ebert Brothers Construction in 1973, was also a director of Trebe from 1993 to 2001, and was on Ebert Construction’s board from its inception in 1999 until 2015.
In the mid-90s Trebe built Wellington’s Marion Square apartment buildings, which developed leaks and toxic mould problems.
But when the issues were uncovered Trebe NZ was already in liquidation. Trebe’s creditors claimed losses of $14 million, but the liquidator put the company’s assets at only $40,000.
The apartment owners were given court permission to sue Trebe for $6.1m in damages, and the matter was eventually settled out of court.
At the time, the Building Subcontractors Federation criticised Trebe for creating a new company, Ebert Construction, while it was still settling the Marion Square claim hanging over Trebe.
The federation later successfully pushed for legislation to crack down on ‘‘phoenix companies’’, meaning companies that have risen from the ashes of old ones.
Apart from Hale, Ebert Construction’s other directors are Nigel Boyd Foster, also of Wellington, and Lawrence Michael Phillips of Wanaka.
The company has also had at least two high-profile workplace accidents, the most recent involving a worker being seriously injured worker at a dairy plant site in Pokeno in 2015.
Ebert was convicted and ordered to pay $100,000 in fines and reparations.
The worker received serious head injuries and fractures after falling through a hole, which was covered with a steel plate but not bolted down.
In 2015 another worker at the site of a Countdown supermarket that Ebert was building in Auckland was injured after falling five storeys down a lift shaft.