Stephen Jones, former Greyhound bus line chairman and director...

Stephen Jones, former Greyhound bus line chairman and director on biotechnology companies, has gone bankrupt.
THE former chairman of bus line Greyhound and several biotechnology companies has finally been declared bankrupt after lengthy court fights.

The bankruptcy of Stephen Jones came this month, a day before he turned 70.

He now joins two other former directors of Brisbane-based drug developer Invion who were bankrupted after the company took legal action against them.

“The jury’s out for me as to whether I will seek to appeal,” Mr Jones told The Courier-Mail.

If he appealed, he said he would also seek to get the bankruptcy ruling stayed.

Mr Jones rose to prominence in Queensland as chairman of struggling bus line Greyhound in the late 1990s.

He had other stints on boards of life-science companies including Invion and Bresagen, and he was involved in corporate turnarounds such as at credit card provider International Card Systems Australia.

But he and two other former directors of Invion, then called CBio, were sued by their former company in 2012.

That resulted in the trio in 2014 copping a blistering judgment in the Supreme Court about their arrangement and disclosure of more than $1 million in payouts to themselves after resigning from Invion.

Former Chief Justice Paul De Jersey described him and other directors as acting “dishonestly”.

Mr Jones has rejected that finding and branded the lawsuit against the three directors as malicious.

The trio had failed in a plea to the Court of Appeal to overturn the Supreme Court finding, and Mr Jones’ subsequent turn to the High Court was knocked back.

Insolvency documents show former Invion managing director Jason Yeates and former finance director James Greig also fell into bankruptcy in December.

They have disclosed unsecured creditors of $1.9 million each, according to their bankruptcy trustees Matthew Joiner and Gerry Collins of BDO.

But Mr Jones kept battling in the Federal Circuit Court. In a 400-page affidavit, he had argued the court should “go behind” Justice De Jersey’s judgment, errors had been made in his original judgment and an abuse of process had taken place.

Justice Michael Baumann knocked back Mr Jones’s arguments, pointing out the Court of Appeal had not identified any errors of law and there was no abuse of process.

However, Justice Baumann noted “Mr Jones has a good working knowledge of the law (at least Corporations Law) from the way in which his affidavit articulates his concerns”.

Mr Jones is yet to file his statement of affairs, and Mr Joiner said the debt owing to Invion alone was $1.2 million plus costs.