Former One.Tel director Jodee Rich is stepping up security at his luxurious Vaucluse estate following the troubled telco's very public collapse and calls from over 3,000 furious unsecured creditors for him to pay back his AU$6.9 million bonus.
Sources have told ZDNet that Rich is taking security seriously these days, having installed three new outdoor security cameras at his up-market Vaucluse property yesterday.
Floodlights will be set up today, and Rich is having tinted windows added to his "fortress" after he was covertly filmed at home by a television crew.
Rich has been in the media spotlight since quitting his One.Tel board seat and executive position less than a fortnight before the telco called in the administrators.
Rich has come under public pressure from the Prime Minister down to pay back the multi-million dollar bonus he paid himself last year, upon revelations that One.Tel's debt is now AU$600 million and climbing.
One.Tel's creditors number in excess of 3000, many of them small businesses such as advertising companies, phone dealers, IT contractors and even furniture fitters.
Joint voluntary administrator Steve Sherman said there was "likely to be a fallout" -- meaning that some of these small businesses will go to the wall because of debts they are owed by the sunken carrier.
One.Tel owes its 1400 workers AU$19 million in entitlements, many of whom are expecting to be walked off the job tomorrow.
Lucent strikes
Lucent Technologies has appointed Greg Hall of PricewaterhouseCoopers as receiver to the One.Tel Network group, in a move which is likely to put him at odds with Sherman.
"The companies hold certain assets within the Next Generation mobile digital network, and the key objective of the receivership will be to maximise the realisation value of those assets for the benefit of creditors," Hall said.
"At this stage my investigations are continuing and it is too early to comment further," he added.
One.Tel claims it is indebted by about AU$50 million to Lucent and the 18-bank syndicate that funded the telco's AU$1.15 billion Next Generation network.
Lucent built the network under the agreement that on completion of each network in prospective states One.Tel would donate spectrum and transfer subscribers to each state network, according to the administrator.
Lucent still owns residual portions of the network in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney and is entitled in part to the networks in Adelaide and Brisbane, the administrator said.
