Correction:
Information recently received indicates that a slight adjustment to the museum membership numbers is required
DSR&M has
450 members
1000 ex members
6 active volunteers
there is very little point in your continually citing the number or presumed number of ex- members. what you fail to realise is that once you have resigned your membership, you have no legal standing in and about the affairs of the company. you only become yet another member of the public making general observations. only a member has legal standing eg to complain to the Fraud Squad about any conspiracy to defraud the company.
I trust that any deal to buy 7 run down locos for what appears to be an exorbitant price is being conducted at arms length and everything is above board. if it isn't things have a tendency to unravel, usually over a fair period of time, and often people end up in jail. this can sometimes happen with individuals who lack the intelligence and sophistication to distinguish between the affairs of a company as a separate legal entity and their own personal interests.
when a liquidation occurs, members become defunctus deficcio (a play, by the way, on the words "functus offico")- liquidators pay attention only to creditors, in respect of whose interests they act. Liquidators can conduct enquiries into the affairs of the company including public examinations into the directors and so on. They can also have transactions set aside for various reasons. Often criminal proceedings can flow from what is revealed in these examinations or from their enquiries. The event of liquidation may be the first breathe of fresh air that a company has ever seen in its life, as liquidators are and are required to be completely dispassionate and impartial.
if a liquidation does occur, members who rush in and recover their small items "donated" to the company are stealing and the liquidators will involve that part of the police force that handles theft. that includes those who think they have a moral right to recover some property or to sample same, because their unsecured loans remain unpaid and they are unlikely to ever see a cent in dividends.
as you undoubtedly may have gained by now, by way of "blinding insight, the incurring of something like $560,000 (less whatever is accepted as a "deposit") in further debt clearly places a company that has no visible means of income or support save for a revolving door of further member loans and donations (see the Henry Report on closing rorts involving tax deductible "donations") often to pay off existing loans, clearly within the ambit of insolvency. anyone who sits on the board in these circumstances becomes personally liable for the company's debts incurred whilst it trades as insolvent, and could end up losing all their personal assets such as their home. Given the company's lack of a clear external income or revenue base, it may never have ever been anything but insolvent anyway, from the time that the Government required its incorporation before it would advance a taxpayer funded grant. But that is for the liquidators to resolve. There are relation back time limits. The incursion of further debt also relegates an opening to the public back further. It may never open to the public. People are now starting to accept that as a distinct possibility. There is a considerable cost involved in complying with Council's requirements before it can open to the public, let alone running costs, eg the huge whack the insurers take and all the other regulatory requirements take money.
I personally don't care what happens. I like watching disaster movies. They fascinate me. I like watching YouTube uploads of train wrecks (Ünstoppable"- "we ain't a train wreck yet" one hour later into the movie, the bomb goes off). I am financially conservative and appreciate what was told to me by the small Tenterfield group that all they have acquired has actually been funded by the money they take at the door (which, last week, I gratefully parted with $24 in their collection box- ie 4 people X $6). They are financially conservative, like myself, and balance their books. And they are open to the public! wow! and have visible means of support! (a term derived from the old Vagrancy Act)
) and be hit with large fines.
a few years ago to purchase a toilet block.