Clive Palmer says media pack outside court made him fear for his safety
|
Version 0 of 1. Clive Palmer has said his encounter with a media pack outside the federal court after examinations into the collapse of Queensland Nickel has left him with an “apprehension about his safety”. Palmer has applied for an order that he be spared exposure to media questioning when leaving the court by being allowed to leave from an internal car park instead of the front entrance. His wife, Anna, has sworn a statement that she was “reasonably violently” elbowed by a cameraman as her husband left court on Friday, Palmer’s barrister, Nicholas Ferrett, told the court on Monday. Tempers again flared when Palmer entered on Monday, the tycoon telling a photographer who complained about his security guards shoving him aside: “Push my wife again and you’ll be sorry.” Ferrett said federal court security had denied Palmer permission to use the internal car park because of “a view that … no special arrangements were to be made”. He said there had been “upon departure on Friday afternoon a fair gaggle of press waiting outside”. “As Mrs Palmer left, she was elbowed by a cameraman trying to get footage … and reasonably violently,” he said, adding that public interest in the hearings had created “the incentive to get good footage and get a good story”. He offered to hand up affidavits from Anna Palmer and two of the private guards from Gatecrash Security providing accounts of the encounter which would bear out the former parliamentarian’s “reasonable apprehension of risk”. “What I want to ask for is a direction that Mr Palmer be allowed to enter and leave the court via the car park and be dropped off at the car park,” he said. Registrar Murray Belcher said he would decide the matter in due course but would not “allow it to distract” the resumption of Palmer’s examination by liquidators. Media who were present on Friday have disputed that Anna Palmer was pushed by a cameraman, saying she stumbled after being knocked by one of the security guards. One of the guards is also accused of pushing an Australian Associated Press photographer, Dave Hunt, into some bushes. The matter is reportedly under investigation by the federal court marshal after court security complained about the conduct of Palmer’s security detail. On Friday liquidators asked the tycoon to make contact with his nephew Clive Mensink – the sole registered director of Queensland Nickel – to ask him when he planned to return from overseas. Palmer said on Monday he had managed “after some difficulties” to contact Mensink, who was on a ship “somewhere between Helsinki and St Petersburg”. “He said he had no plans [to return] at the moment,” Palmer said. Mensink had asked that Palmer pass on his email address to solicitors for the liquidators to make contact. He had also instructed his own solicitors to commence federal court proceedings “as soon as possible” to remove liquidator John Park of FTI Consulting for alleged “serious breaches of the Corporation Act”. When Tom Sullivan, acting for the special purpose liquidator, asked Palmer to confirm that Mensink had “no immediate plans” to return to Australia, Palmer said: “That’s all he said to me.” Before entering court on Monday Palmer had his public relations representative, Andrew Crook, hand out a statement to waiting journalists describing the examination as “a disappointment, as the examiner will not ask me why Queensland Nickel went into liquidation”. “I will not make any further statements until the conclusion of the examination. The media needs to understand that the court is asking the questions, not them.” |