Macquarie students ordered to return missing equipment
Harriet Alexander Higher Education Reporter
May 26, 2007
MACQUARIE University students have been ordered to return $70,000 worth of equipment after being filmed removing it from their offices shortly before their representative council was liquidated.
The besieged student president, Victor Ma, and other former councillors, moved furniture, computers, books and records from the Macquarie University Students' Council offices before the Supreme Court ordered the organisation be wound up last week.
The liquidator, Trevor Pogroske, said he arrived at the offices on the afternoon he was appointed by the court to discover them bare.
"Clearly, assets had been removed," Mr Pogroske said.
Later, the university discovered from closed-circuit television footage that Mr Ma and the former councillors had cleared the office 11 days earlier, Mr Pogroske said.
Mr Ma denied yesterday the students had stolen the equipment. They had put them into storage to protect student assets in the case of a university takeover, he said.
"The liquidator was quite angry," Mr Ma said.
"He said things were illegally removed. I said, 'Wait, wait, wait. Please refrain from such accusations. Things were removed before you were appointed as a liquidator, therefore it was legal at the time.' "
The university said it had begun legal proceedings to retrieve the equipment, but Mr Ma said the councillors returned it last night.
Eastwood police said it was a university matter.
Earlier this week the Federal Court ordered that the university's union, Students at Macquarie, be wound up, after its directors returned more than $200,000 they had moved out of the organisation's accounts.
Mr Ma, who was also the union president before being sacked last month, said he and the other directors had moved the money to pay for a legal fight against the university's planned takeover of the student organisations.
But as both student organisations are in liquidation, the way is clear for the university to create a new company to run student activities, catering, sports and shops on campus.
The new structure means the end of student politics at Macquarie University.
The company will be managed by the university, and the students sitting on the board will be appointed by the university.
A spokeswoman for the university said the board may hold student elections at a later date.