What happened: A NSW court found that a man who repeatedly called himself the "owner and operator" of an uninsured food company was a de facto director and personally liable for over $101,000 in workers' compensation payments
Who's involved: The Workers Compensation Nominal Insurer (plaintiff) and Working Lunch Company Pty Ltd (in liquidation), a food manufacturer
What's at stake: $101,771.87 in compensation payments plus $9,509.81 in pre-judgment interest
Why it matters: The ruling shows that a person's own words to insurers and regulators can be used to establish de facto directorship - and personal liability - even when they were never formally appointed
Where it stands: Judgment entered on 6 October 2026. Costs awarded to the plaintiff
"I am the owner and operator of the business."
That single line, given to an insurer's investigator, became the centrepiece of a NSW District Court judgment that landed a man with a $111,000 personal bill for workers' compensation payments he insisted had nothing to do with him.
The case, decided on 6 October 2026, involved a food manufacturer called Working Lunch Company that employed a worker who slipped and was injured on the job in February 2021. The company had no workers' compensation insurance at the time - a breach of its legal obligations under the Workers Compensation Act 1987 (NSW). The worker claimed through New South Wales' uninsured employer scheme, and the Workers Compensation Nominal Insurer - the statutory body that steps in when employers have no cover - paid out $101,771.87 in compensation and medical expenses.
Working Lunch Company went into liquidation in July 2024. That opened a statutory recovery path: the Nominal Insurer can pursue company directors personally when the company itself cannot repay the fund.
The wrinkle here is who counts as a director.
The company's sole registered director - the partner of the second defendant's son - consented to judgment before the hearing, effectively accepting liability without a fight.
That left the second defendant, who had never been formally listed as a director at the time of the worker's injury. He told the court he was a business development manager. A salesman. Someone who brought in new opportunities and occasionally offered advice.
The Nominal Insurer said the evidence told a very different story - and most of it came from the second defendant's own mouth.
In a recorded interview with the insurer's investigator, the second defendant described himself as the "owner and operator" of the business who had "started the business" in 2020. In a later written statement, he called himself the "Managing Director." He told investigators that staffing problems had "caused me a lot of staffing issues and the eventual closure of the kitchen." When a staff member failed to report the worker's injury, he complained that the employee "never reported it to me."
In an email to the insurer and others in October 2021, he wrote: "Unfortunately, in this whole process me as the employer is guilty."
A rehabilitation provider, in a recorded phone call, referred to organising a meeting "with boss Peter" to resolve workplace issues.
A chain of emails from November 2021, tendered as evidence, showed the second defendant directing the company's response to a creditor chasing an outstanding $25,074.16 debt. When he told a person handling the company's finances to pay a $2,000 instalment "now" and that person could not process it, the second defendant emailed his son - whose partner was the registered director - and told him to handle it.
His son's reply: "Beatriz is still on as director????"
The second defendant responded: "Ok will get that done as well" - a reference, the court found, to removing the registered director, as though that were his call to make.
There was a reason the second defendant had never been formally appointed. He was bankrupt from January 2021 to January 2024, which meant he could not lawfully serve as a company director during that entire period. The court noted he had been a director of roughly 30 companies over three decades prior.
When he was briefly registered as a director from February to April 2022, that appointment was itself unlawful - his bankruptcy had not yet been discharged.
Confronted in cross-examination with his own statements calling himself the owner, operator and managing director, he did not dispute making them. He accepted the decision to create the company was his. Asked about calling himself the managing director, he conceded: "I assumed the role, yes."
The court applied the established test for de facto directorship - which looks at what a person actually did, not what title they held. It found that the second defendant "conceived of the company as his business, exercised authority over its operations, represented it in dealings with third parties and assumed responsibility for matters ordinarily falling within the province of a director."
His claim to have been a business development manager was, in the court's words, "a cloak for directorial activity."
The court also noted he had called no witnesses to support his version of events - not the accountant, not his estranged son, not any of the several people who could have backed up his account - and was entitled to draw an unfavourable inference from that silence.
Judgment was entered for $101,771.87 plus $9,509.81 in pre-judgment interest.
For workers' compensation claims teams and recovery units, the case is a pointed reminder that the statutory path to personal recovery from directors is not limited to names on a company register - and that the strongest evidence of who really runs a business often comes from the person's own correspondence with insurers.
The claims in this matter were tested at a hearing and the court made findings on the balance of probabilities. The judgment is that of the District Court of New South Wales and may be subject to appeal.
