One name. Two companies. One liquidation.

Macarthur Energy Pty Ltd, ACN 604 435 421, entered creditors' voluntary liquidation on 8 September, the process that winds up an insolvent company. Daniel Robert Soire is liquidator. It traded under thirteen registered business names spanning energy, solar, broadband and electric vehicles across Macarthur, Penrith and the Sutherland Shire.

But it is not the company the Australian Energy Regulator identifies as the authorised electricity retailer. That is Macarthur Energy Retail Pty Ltd, ACN 643 524 921.

And Macarthur Energy's own seventeen-page electricity contract does not resolve the difference. It names no company, no ACN and no ABN. It calls the seller "Macarthur Energy".

For anyone owed money, holding a warranty or buying electricity under that name, the company number matters. Insolvency attaches to the legal entity, not to the brand.

What the 8 September notice establishes is narrow: ACN 604 435 421 is in liquidation. What that means across the boundary between the two companies is not established by anything we have read.

Paid for solar, a battery, electricity or another purchase? I paid them money

Owed an invoice, wages, rent or another debt? They owe me money

Before taking a recovery step, establish which legal company was on the other side of the transaction.

A business name is a name a company trades under, not a separate company. An ACN is the nine-digit identifier of the company itself. None of these thirteen is a company. All are held by ACN 604 435 421, the company named in the notice.

An earlier name, MACARTHUR ELECTRICAL GROUP, ran from December 2015 to April 2018. Then solar in 2020, broadband four months later, electric vehicles in 2021, two new regions in 2023, and six names registered inside 48 hours in January 2025. Liquidation twenty months later.

Here is the problem.

The electricity contract says only "Macarthur Energy". The company now in liquidation is Macarthur Energy Pty Ltd. But the company the electricity regulators identify is Macarthur Energy Retail Pty Ltd.

The customer documents do not resolve that difference.

Electricity terms and conditions, June 2024. Seventeen pages. No company name, no ACN and no ABN. Clause 2, "The Parties", identifies the seller only as "Macarthur Energy who sells energy to you".

Community battery brochure, 2023. Calls Macarthur Energy "a smart energy retailer" and offered battery capacity to residents. The only legal entity named in twelve pages is in the final-page footer: Macarthur Energy PTY. LTD., Gregory Hills.

That is the company now in liquidation.

But the brochure does not establish that Macarthur Energy Pty Ltd entered the electricity contract, and the contract itself never identifies a legal company. Neither document mentions Macarthur Energy Retail Pty Ltd.

The official electricity records make the distinction clearer.

AEMO operates the National Electricity Market and records its registered participants. The Australian Energy Regulator records companies authorised to retail electricity.

They identify Macarthur Energy Retail Pty Ltd, ACN 643 524 921, not Macarthur Energy Pty Ltd, ACN 604 435 421.

Macarthur Energy Retail appears in AEMO's register under ABN 89 643 524 921. Macarthur Energy Pty Ltd does not appear anywhere in the workbook after searches of all thirteen sheets by company name, ACN and ABN. Market Customer is AEMO's category for businesses buying electricity through the wholesale market.

The AER independently identifies Macarthur Energy Retail Pty Ltd as the current authorised electricity retailer, effective from 23 December 2021.

AEMO also treats the legal identifier as important: where an organisation conducts business under multiple ABNs, the functions carried on under each ABN must be registered accordingly.

So the position in the public records is straightforward: the company in liquidation and the authorised electricity retailer are different legal entities.

What is not straightforward is the customer's side. The published electricity contract says only "Macarthur Energy", so the contract itself does not establish which of those entities is the counterparty.

That distinction can matter. Getting the entity wrong can mean writing to the wrong company, lodging a claim in the wrong insolvency, or assuming an obligation belongs to a company when the records do not establish that it does.

The relationship is not a guess from the names. Macarthur Energy Retail's own 2021 application to the Australian Energy Regulator says it was formed following the success of Macarthur Energy's New South Wales solar business, to add electricity retailing to the solar offer, using existing Macarthur Energy solar staff and new hires. It identifies Mathew Cox as the person who started Macarthur Energy and had been running it, installing solar across Campbelltown, Camden, Wollondilly and Picton.

Its group chart placed Macarthur Energy, ABN 73 604 435 421, above Macarthur Energy Retail, ABN 89 643 524 921, and showed Cox as 100 per cent shareholder of each. Retail was new and had no financial statements of its own, so under "Related companies" the application supplied audited financial statements for Macarthur Energy instead.

The connection is still visible in the customer plumbing. The Macarthur Energy website sends anyone clicking "My Account" to a live billing and account portal. The visible page branding says "MacArthur Energy" and the footer reads "Copyright 2026 by Macarthur Energy". The web address is macarthurenergyretail.utilmate.com.

Energy Made Easy, the Australian Government's electricity comparison service, lists a contact number for Macarthur Energy Retail. It is the same number published across the Macarthur Energy website. That site also links customers to Macarthur Solar.

MACARTHUR ENERGY and MACARTHUR SOLAR are registered business names of Macarthur Energy Pty Ltd, ACN 604 435 421, the company in liquidation. Macarthur Energy Retail Pty Ltd holds no registered business name at all.

The relationship between the companies is not the mystery. The boundary between them is. The corporate line is clear in the registers but much less clear in the customer-facing business. The records do not support a clean division in which solar and hardware sit entirely with the company in liquidation while electricity sits entirely with Retail.

That establishes how they were related in 2021, and that their customer systems remain connected. It does not establish their ownership or control now.

The Fair Work Commission published a decision on 9 October 2025 in Connor Nicholson v MacArthur Energy Pty Ltd, [2025] FWC 3018. Deputy President Wright found, at paragraph 21:

> "The evidence before me establishes that on 8 April 2025, Mr Cox sent home all employees of Macarthur Energy because the company was experiencing financial difficulty, and he was not sure if he would be able to pay employees when their next pay was due on 10 April 2025."

That is the Commission's own finding. The decision separately records Mr Nicholson's evidence that the day before, Cox had said he was worried Macarthur Energy was "going under" and had spent six weeks sleeping on the office floor. Employees were recalled two days later. The application was dismissed, because the Commission found the employee had not been dismissed.

One qualification, and it is the same one this whole article is about. The decision names no ACN and no ABN. We checked. It identifies the employer as "Macarthur Energy" and names Mathew Cox as its manager. Macarthur Energy Retail's 2021 application independently identifies Cox as the person who started and ran Macarthur Energy, and its group chart identifies Macarthur Energy as ABN 73 604 435 421. That ABN belongs to the company now in liquidation. The company's own brochure also names Cox as founder. That is the basis for the attribution, rather than an identifier printed in the Commission's decision.

Still not established by anything we have read:

Nothing obtained names any individual as a current officer of either company.

One caution rather than an open question: the registration of six new business names in January 2025 sits eleven weeks before the Commission's April 2025 finding. They are two dated facts near each other, and this article draws no line between them.

If you bought a battery, a solar system or an electricity plan from any of these names, the first thing you need is which company you dealt with. This edition shows why that is hard.

If you paid for solar, a battery, electricity or another purchase and did not get what you expected: I paid them money

If you are owed for an invoice, wages, rent, supplied goods or another debt: They owe me money

The next step depends on what happened: a card payment, an unpaid invoice, supplied goods, wages, a deposit or a lease. Each route is set out with a link to every official source, and a free form returns the resolved legal entity and ACN, the names that resolve to it, and the published deadlines.

Not sure which applies? Read the full guide: Owed money by a company in administration or liquidation?

We publish public-record information, not advice. The appointed practitioner is the authoritative source on any matter.

ASIC published 96 notices covering 95 entities:

A winding-up application asks a court for an order; it does not mean the company has been wound up. A members' voluntary liquidation is ordinarily solvent. 64 deadlines fall out of the day.

See the full 8 September register, free with a subscription.

These are applications, not findings of insolvency. Hearing details are from the notices and may change. The Deputy Commissioner of Taxation brought 3 of the 14; the Workers Compensation Nominal Insurer and Optimus Balance Pty Ltd brought 2 each.

12 more are in the full register.

ASIC published notices dated 8 September 2026 provide the appointment, the liquidator, the applications and the hearing details. Registration dates, business names and their dated history are from the ASIC company register and the Australian Business Register.

The market participant record is the Australian Energy Market Operator's NEM Registration and Exemption List, dated 8 September on AEMO's registration page, downloaded and searched in full. The retailer authorisation and the 2021 application are the Australian Energy Regulator's own published register and the company's published application to it. The terms and conditions, the community battery brochure, the forms and policies page and the account portal it links to were all read directly. The retailer contact number is from Energy Made Easy, the Australian Government's comparison service. The employment decision is the Fair Work Commission's own published copy of [2025] FWC 3018, PR792514.

Practitioner and applicant counts are findings of our captured ASIC-notice corpus, which begins in January 2025, not audited totals.

Two legal companies. One customer-facing ecosystem. Only one is in liquidation.

The contract says Macarthur Energy. The liquidation notice says Macarthur Energy Pty Ltd. Both electricity registers say Macarthur Energy Retail Pty Ltd. The contract itself never says which.

Get tomorrow's resolved register by email: legal names and ACNs, the names behind them, applicants, court dates, and the companies a brand search sends you past.

Know someone with solar or a battery from one of these names? Forward them this one.