Twelve companies, one notice. Then the regulator stepped in.

Same order, every week: At a Glance · The Lead · Features · Quick Hits · Formerly Known As · The Scoreboard · The Lender Tape · The Dashboard · The Receipts · The Watchlist · Your Ledger File. Read the whole thing or jump to your section; it's always where you left it.

The week on the failure register: twelve companies behind one of South Australia's best-known energy names entered voluntary administration in a single combined notice, and the consequences arrived within days: authorisation revoked, customers transferred, market trading suspended. Elsewhere, a company registered in 1963 reached the register under a name it had carried for less than a day. All told, 308 companies entered external administration or had controllers appointed, in line with the four-week average. The count was ordinary. The week was not.

On Friday 3 July, Robert Smith and Jason Preston of McGrathNicol were appointed joint administrators to twelve companies in one combined notice: the entities behind ZEN Energy, the South Australian electricity retailer and generator founded by economist Ross Garnaut. The directors made the appointments themselves under s436A; a receiver was not involved. Garnaut, for the record, stepped down as chair in February; he is the founder in this story, not a participant in its ending.

The register map, which no news report has printed in full:

We describe these as related entities because the administrators' combined notice treats them as one appointment event and the AER's own application documents describe multiple ZEN entities within the one structure; parent-subsidiary links are not established on the free public record.

This was not a small book failing quietly. Both lead companies sit in the ATO's $100M+ corporate tax transparency population: ZEN Energy Retail reported total income of $122.4M and Zen Energy Pty Ltd $229.8M in the most recent published year. The retail company also carries about $132.6M in federal contract notices, roughly 96% of it a single ten-year renewable energy agreement with CSIRO signed in 2020, recorded under the supplier name the company then carried: SIMEC ZEN Energy Retail. The former-names column keeps paying rent.

Then the part the appointment notice does not show. SA Power Networks had applied to wind up the retail company on 26 June, a week before the administrators arrived. And in the days after the appointment, the regulators moved: a Retailer of Last Resort event transferred ZEN Retail's customers to replacement retailers, the AER revoked ZEN Energy Retail's electricity retailer authorisation, and AEMO suspended the company from trading as a market customer. A retailer's failure is one of the few insolvencies with a statutory safety net under its customers; the register shows the entry into administration, and the energy regulators' registers show the exit from the market. The administrators held the first creditors' meeting on 15 July; a rescue or sale process is reported to be under way, and the administrators' report, ordinarily circulated to creditors about five weeks in, is the document that will explain what happened. It is due in early August, and it is on our Watchlist.

One more register fact for scale: the week's sharpest industry move, Electricity, Gas, Water and Waste Services at 12 appointments against a typical 3, is this one event in its entirety. Every one of the twelve utilities rows in this week's file is a ZEN entity. The sector did not wobble; one structure did.

Stelph Pty Ltd, a Darwin medical-supplies and trading company, was wound up by the Federal Court on 30 June, with Brodie Hilet of Rodgers Reidy appointed liquidator. No news outlet has covered it. The public registers tell the arc on their own.

The company registered five business names, four of them marketed as divisions: Stelph Medical, Stelph International, Stelph Marine and Stelph Energy. In February 2022 it held a $65,700 Defence contract for medical support and testing services. For the 2021-22 income year it reported $1.26M of R&D expenditure in the ATO's transparency data; it does not appear in the following year's report. The winding-up application was filed on 7 April by Toll Energy and Marine Logistics Pty Ltd, which Toll Group lists among its businesses and which serves the same offshore and marine sector Stelph traded into; the court made the order on 30 June. A Defence-supplied trader in the pandemic years, a seven-figure R&D claimant for one of them, wound up on the application of a company from its own sector's supply chain: each of those facts is a public record, and none of it required a press release.

Four companies from this appointment week appear in the current source snapshot under bare number-names, below the register's usual rate of about one in fifty. One of them dropped even the A.C.N. prefix: nine digits and Pty Ltd. The raw register no longer tells you who they were. The name-history data does:

One clarification the second row needs: the Berkelo sourdough bakeries themselves are not in liquidation. The brand and its sites have been operated by Sonoma since February 2025 and continue trading; the liquidated company is a former operating entity that shed the name along the way. That distinction is exactly what a name-keyed exposure check gets wrong on its own.

And one company arrived under a name younger than its appointment. Asvar Pty Limited was registered in January 1963 and spent 63 years on the register as Associated Insulation Pty Limited; the register records its current name starting 29 June 2026, the day the NSW Supreme Court ordered it wound up, with David Mansfield and Philip Robinson of Deloitte appointed joint liquidators. The company has never held an ABN, so treat the 63 years as register vintage rather than evidence of recent trading. The rename and its date are reported as registry facts; the register does not say why a name changed, and a rename implies no wrongdoing. What it does mean is practical: by the time this company reached the public record, its 63-year identity survived only in the former-names field.

167 appointees (162 practitioners, plus five financiers enforcing directly) shared the week's 308 appointments. Smith's twelve are the ZEN cluster in one morning; those appointments are joint with Jason Preston, and counts here credit the first-named appointee. The quarter's benchmark: Geoffrey Granger has taken 100 first-time appointments in 90 days, 2.8% of every corporate failure in the country. (Counts are appointments on the public record; they say nothing about outcomes or quality. Busy is busy.)

8 appointments this week recorded the financier or security trustee itself as appointee.

The trailing six-week window recorded 51 appointments from 25 May to 5 July, against 47 from 13 April to 24 May. Still elevated, but the gap is narrowing. This trailing comparison is not the Receipts grading window; that one is below, with its own dates.

308 first-time appointments (four-week average: 298; same week last year: 374, so this week ran 18% below last year). The new financial year is five days old; the FY tracker returns when the base is worth printing.

Electricity, Gas, Water and Waste Services recorded 12 against a typical 3; as the Lead sets out, all twelve are the ZEN event. The week's largest genuine sector move is Accommodation and Food Services at 52 against a 36 four-week average; unlike utilities, no single file accounts for it. Construction at 81 against 76 reads as drift rather than a break: a third straight week slightly above its average. One operational note: across 23 years of monthly data, July and August are the register's second- and third-busiest months, so heavier files are the seasonal norm from here.

Appointment types: creditors' voluntary liquidation 159; restructuring 45; voluntary administration 43; court liquidation 37; other controller appointments 11; receiver and manager 7; receiver 6.

By state: New South Wales 113; Victoria 90; Queensland 50; Western Australia 28; South Australia 13; Australian Capital Territory 8; Tasmania 3; Northern Territory 3.

Every forward call gets logged and graded in print, hits and misses both. Record: 0 graded · 3 open.

Open threads we're tracking until the public record answers them; when it says more, so will we.

This article discusses roughly 25 companies. The complete 308-row appointment file is in this week's Member File. The Ledger File is a CSV of every appointment on the week's register: legal name, ACN/ABN, former and trading names, appointment type and date, appointee and firm, lender-direct flag, industry, state, postcode, company age, estimated report dates, and size flags. From this week it ships as a clean 308-row data file plus a one-page column guide, so your import reads exactly 308 records. Match it against your exposure list, whatever shape that takes: a debtor ledger, a rent roll, a lessee book, a funded-debtor file, insured buyer limits, a client list. This week the former-names column is what separates the Berkelo brand from the liquidated entity, and it is the only place Asvar's 63-year identity still exists. If you run bureau alerts, they rang first; that's their job. This is your completeness sweep and rename-catcher.

This week's angle, for credit insurers (this slot rotates through reader types each week): the Size flags surface the insurable-grade names inside the micro noise. This week that means a $100M+ energy retailer and a Defence-supplied trader in the same file as three hundred small private companies.

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Programming note: the week to 12 July lands here Tuesday 28 July. If a Watchlist thread closes in between, ENI's meeting outcome above being the likely one, a short follow-up lands midweek; that is what the Watchlist is for.

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Sources: ASIC insolvency statistics Series 1 & 2 (CC BY; published 20 July 2026, data to 5 July, ~2 weeks in arrears); applicable CC-licensed ASIC register extracts and the ASIC company and business names datasets; ABR; ATO corporate tax transparency and R&D tax incentive transparency reports; AusTender; the AER's retailer authorisation register and public application documents; AEMO's market notice on the suspension of ZEN Energy Retail; Toll Group's published business listings for the petitioning creditor's affiliation; ASIC Published Notices, used only for per-entity appointment, application and winding-up checks on named companies, retrieved 20-21 July; no bulk notice data is redistributed in this article. The ZEN sale process, Retailer of Last Resort transfer and customer arrangements are as reported by the administrators and in the press. CC-licensed material is attributed to ASIC/Commonwealth and the relevant agencies. Entering external administration, restructuring or liquidation is a fact of the public record and implies no wrongdoing by any company or person named. General information only, not financial advice.