A Dunedin woman has been banned from running companies after the collapse of her scaffolding business, according to the Otago Daily Times, which reports she was left “shocked and distressed” by the decision. The surprise is understandable. The commercial failure had already happened. The ban is a second, separate reckoning, and it lands on her personally rather than on the company.
That is the point every director in the trades should take from this. A liquidation ends a company. It does not end the scrutiny of the people who ran it.
The ban arrives after the business is already dead
Under section 385 of the Companies Act 1993, the Registrar of Companies can prohibit someone from being a director or managing any company for up to 10 years, where they ran a company that failed within the previous five years and their management contributed to that failure. A Companies Office spokesperson this year called it “a protective, forward-looking provision”, aimed at stopping the next failure rather than punishing the last one.
The timing is what catches people out. The liquidator files reports, the Registrar reviews them, and the notice turns up months or years after the doors closed. By then most directors have moved on mentally. Banned individuals are listed on the Companies Office’s public register, and notices appear in the Gazette. Breaching a ban carries potential imprisonment or a heavy fine, so it is not a technicality you can work around by putting a spouse’s name on the paperwork.
Construction keeps filling the register
The Dunedin case is not an outlier. In March, seven directors were banned nationally, with bans running two to eight years, and five of the seven ran construction-sector businesses. One was Marcus Raymond Kennerley, sole director of Scaffold Alchemy Limited, who received a six-year ban effective 30 March 2026. There is no indication the two scaffolding cases are connected, but the pattern is hard to miss.
The same cohort shows how wide the spectrum runs. Joel Wiki of Eminence Tiling Limited received an eight-year ban, the longest of the group. Glen Green of Innovative Roofing Limited got six years after investigators found an estimated $362,000 of personal and related-party spending run through the company, plus evidence he had hidden and sold company assets before liquidation. That matter went to Police.
A messy breakup can be enough
Scaffold Alchemy is the more instructive case for ordinary business owners, because it does not read like fraud. The High Court judgment in Heagney v Scaffold Alchemy, delivered in May 2024, describes a company registered in February 2022 and trading from April that year. Christine Heagney held half the shares, with Kennerley as sole director. When their personal relationship ended in December 2022, the company deadlocked and Heagney applied to liquidate it on just and equitable grounds.
The detail that should make directors wince is the debt. Both shareholders had personally guaranteed a $30,000 overdraft and a $15,000 loan from ASB, taken out only weeks before the split. Creditor invoices were still outstanding and Kennerley had been asking suppliers for extensions. The company went into liquidation. The guarantees did not.
So a small trades firm can fail for unglamorous reasons, leave its owners personally on the hook to the bank, and still produce a director ban years later. Three separate consequences, one collapse.
An old accountability gap, finally being enforced
The sector has been warned. Back in 2019, Graham Burke, then-head of the Specialist Trade Contractors Federation, complained to RNZ that directors who failed to ring-fence retention money had “actually got away with it”. A BDO survey cited at the time found 93 percent of firms compliant with retentions rules, up from 72 percent a year earlier. Progress, but plainly not the end of the problem.
The shift since then is enforcement. The Registrar is using section 385 regularly, and construction is where it keeps biting. That is a reasonable use of a light-touch tool. It does not stop anyone starting a business or taking a risk. It stops people who have already burned creditors from doing it again with a fresh company number, which protects every honest subcontractor further down the chain.
What directors should do now
Keep clean books, separate personal and company spending, and stop trading when the numbers say stop rather than when the bank does. Read every personal guarantee as a promise that outlives the company. And if a liquidator is appointed, assume your conduct will be examined in detail.
The Dunedin director now joins a register that is growing, and on current form, will keep growing with names from scaffolding, roofing and tiling. Insolvency is no longer where the story ends. For a lot of trades directors, it is where the paperwork starts.
Sources
- Otago Daily Times: ‘Shocked and distressed’: Dunedin woman banned from running companies after collapse of scaffolding business (2026-10-16)
- HCA Mag: 7 directors banned from managing companies in New Zealand (2026-05-26)
- NZ Herald: The seven directors Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has banned running companies (2026-05-25)
- Companies Register: Banned directors
- RNZ: Calls for more leadership accountability when companies fail (2019-09-09)
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