‘Appalling’: Local businesses out of pocket after abattoir shuts down owing $103 million

The cattle that move through the Kimberley’s well-worn dirt arteries represent millions of dollars and every animal counts.

Families here have spent decades working the land and building their precarious fortunes.

Much of what they do operates on handshake deals and reputation.

With those, come secrets.

Station manager David Stoate’s family have run Anna Plains Station for decades.

He knows the challenges of the industry intimately.

“It’s relentless. You can’t take your eye off the ball when you’ve got animals to look after,” Mr Stoate says.

Anna Plains has survived floods, cyclones, worker shortages and a live export ban, but it’s the collapse of one vital cog in the machine that has stopped these cattle from getting to market.

This is the Kimberley Meat Company.

Established in 2016 by local cattle king Jack Burton, under the control of parent Yeeda Pastoral Company, it is the only abattoir serving northern WA for more than 2,000 kilometres.

It was a trusted employer for some of the region’s most disadvantaged communities and, for local cattle stations, a godsend.

It provided an alternative to the live export markets, sliced off days of travel time for cattle, and shaved down the expenses associated with trucking the animals over state lines.

It was a place where local producers could kill and process local cattle, and it sat on 1.6 million acres of Yeeda Pastoral Company’s land on the Great Northern Highway.

“It saw an opportunity for cattle produced in the north to be processed in the north, particularly for cattle that were out of specification for live export,” Mr Stoate says.

“Those sorts of cattle are the cattle that are too heavy to get on boats … that was a great option for the industry over the last six or seven years.”

At a time when the industry was still recovering from the short-lived 2011 live export ban, the opening of the abattoir was an important step towards economic resilience.

“The pastoral industry in northern Western Australia has got a long history. It’s been an economic driver over a number of years,” Mr Stoate says.

“It’s critically important that we maintain the public confidence in the industry. We’ve seen what can happen to the sheep industry when some of that public confidence has eroded.”

Just three years into his grand plan, Jack Burton made a quiet exit from the meatworks that was his brainchild.

Hong Kong-based Asia Debt Management took on the majority share in the company. 

It wasn’t long before the whispers began.

The walls start to buckle

Allegations of financial mismanagement, environmental breaches, cattle deaths and unpaid contracts were plaguing the project.

Cowboys would warn each other before taking on jobs, and the handshake deals the industry previously operated on became tighter.

Restructure plans were floated and then axed, and operating costs were creeping up.

Then came the 2023 flood.

In February this year, the meatworks finally closed.

The business’ parent company, Yeeda, called in the administrators and documents revealed the business was more than $103 million in debt.

What was unfolding behind the scenes began to unravel in public.

Whistleblowers told the ABC more than 400 scrub bulls died after they were kept in crowded cattle yards for months on end.

Shaky phone footage was handed over to the ABC depicting the event. Unfortunately, we cannot show it.

Scrub bulls are wild animals and are not used to being in the confined spaces of domestic cattle yards for a period of days, let alone months.

Broome cattle vet Dave Morrell, who has worked in the northern cattle industry since he was a young man, says the videos were confronting.

“If you have a whole lot of bulls jammed in together in a smaller yard, then you start having these problems of stress and trying to work out their pecking order,” he says.

“They will start horning each other and, because they’re wild animals, they’re under extreme stress, and then they [tend to] get secondary bacterial infections and pneumonia. 

“And they die.”

Dr Morrell says the videos raised serious concerns.

“I wouldn’t have thought it was a wise practice to do what [Kimberley Meat Company] did,” he says. 

The bulls, left to die in a set of back yards, were the collateral damage of the company’s financial mismanagement.

Soon, that collateral began to compound.

Late in 2023, unsigned letters appeared under the door of the ABC Kimberley office, with new allegations.

The Kimberley Meat Company’s abattoir carcass waste was thrown into open pits where bloody skeletons were left to rot, potentially exposing other animals on the property to disease and bacteria.

Despite the videos, Yeeda continued to publicly assert its commitment to ensuring acceptable standards were upheld.

“The environmental approvals in place are subject to regular audits by the regulator, which includes disposal of waste,” the company said in a statement to the ABC in November.

While the animal welfare issues were kept under wraps by tight non-disclosure agreements, the money eventually began to talk.

With $103 million owing from the Kimberley region’s coffers, everyone from local tradespeople, stations and contract musterers were left out of pocket.

In the Kimberley, word travels fast and the lawsuits began.

The fallout

Queensland-based lawyer Dan Creevey acted for one small family-run business that is yet to be paid millions.

“It was a very, very big operation that, for his company to take this particular contract on, he had geared up for it over many, many years,” Mr Creevey says.

“It probably was the highlight of his company’s development and it’s financially destroyed him.”

Documents show there are approximately 175 unsecured creditors who are owed money by the meatworks and its parent company, Yeeda.

All are set to receive zero cents to the dollar as the administration wraps up in a sale deal.

Canadian-government-owned Alberta Investment Management Co recently entered into a Deed of Company Arrangement to buy Yeeda Pastoral Company.

Mr Creevey says Yeeda’s conduct was poor throughout the process.

“The conduct of the company over the entire period smacks of being unable to pay its debts,” he says.

“It’s corporate practice at its worst.

“There’s clearly conduct or evidence there that warrants a very, very close examination.”

The administrator’s report, put together by KordaMentha, suggests the company may have been trading while insolvent.

“Both KMC and YPC [were] exhibiting indicators of insolvency for an extended period prior to our appointment,” the administrator’s report read.

“We … do not believe the provisions under safe harbour would be a defence available to its directors.”

KordaMentha declined to comment on the story. 

A spokesperson for the WA Minister for Agriculture Jackie Jarvis, and for the WA Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, declined to answer the ABC’s questions, both saying it was a matter for administrators.

From the wreckage

For pastoralists like Mr Stoate, the abattoir has left its mark on the Kimberley industry.

Once an industry run on handshakes and good business, everyone has become more wary and thoughtful while doing their deals.

“The Kimberley Meat Company obviously did let the industry down in a number of regards, certainly on the animal welfare front and how they dealt financially with clients,” he says.

Bron Christensen is the head of the Kimberley and Pilbara Cattlemen’s Association, an industry body dedicated to protecting the industry’s reputation and its work.

She says undoing the damage done by the Kimberley Meat Company (KMC) will take time.

“There is a percentage of the herd up here in the Kimberley that just doesn’t have a market at the moment, and that’s all because the KMC has closed,” Ms Christensen says.

She says some small family-run stations are looking at costs of up to $230 per head to get the cattle down south to the nearest abattoir.

“Coupled with some fairly ordinary seasons as well, it does hurt and it certainly doesn’t help industry confidence,” she says.

Mr Creevey says the conduct of the company warrants an investigation from the regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

“The unsecured creditors don’t have those sorts of funds [to investigate] and hence that’s why ASIC exists,” he says.

“But again, from my experience, and broadly speaking … there’s no confidence or faith that ASIC can do anything.”

In a statement, ASIC told 7.30 it had not received any information to indicate misconduct by Yeeda Pastoral Company.

“Insolvency practitioners are required to report to ASIC if they suspect that anyone connected to the company that is under external administration may have committed an offence,” the regulator said.

Over the past year, Yeeda Pastoral Company has been hauled in and out of the West Australian Supreme Court for its alleged conduct.

But for Mr Stoate, the steps of the courthouse are a world away from his Kimberley cattle station.

In the next few months he still has to move livestock, worry about when the next rain will come, and wean calves off their mothers.

For him and his team, life goes on.

“The industry existed before Kimberley Meat Company were in existence … and the industry will exist again,” he says.

“We’re a pretty resilient bunch up here. 

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