Ann: Voluntary Administration , page-9

disagree about being a potential good buy - the scraps of APB would be the worst buy of the century. It has survived by constant new capital raisings and MIS funds, at a time when pearl industry has gone into huge decline. All Aussie farmers( the few that are left) have shut down farms, and are copping a big loss on every pearl seeded. The glory days of the 80's and 90's are long gone, and Paspaley has lost 10's of millions on pearling in each of the past few years. Read his AFR Weekend Review interview in January.
Basically, APB produced and sold pearls in relatively small quantities at prices much lower than their projections and MIS documents. Their P&L's were boosted by ASIC or whoever allowing them to book MIS prepayments as sales, whereas they were gobbled up by highly labour intensive, slow production expenses, plus for a while they used outrageous DCF projections based on millions of pearl shell spat , that realistically was never going to go into production for a multitude of reasons, and at prices and quantities far, far below their projections.
No one in pearling will touch this wreck- why would they, when solid farmers such as Paspaley have been closing farms down over the past 3.5 years in a desperate attempt to become profiable. Even if you were gifted APB with no debt, it would be an immediate loss maker, and it would need massive ongoing capital injections, in the hope that markets recover and the dollar drops. Even in the unlikely event this does happen, prices will stay down as Indonesia has captured pearl farming technology and will ramp up production at costs that are a fraction of Australia, albeit in a slightly lower quality - which the market wants anyway.