Bathla offered top dollar for land, but some sellers fought to be paid

When Michael Ryan agreed to sell his sprawling property in Sydney's north-west for $39.5 million, it is unlikely he expected a protracted legal battle to get the buyer to pay.

But after a string of missed settlement deadlines and a fight in the NSW Supreme Court, he ended up financing part of the purchase.

Mr Ryan, the seller, had to effectively lend Bathla money to complete the sale.

An ABC News examination of court records has identified three major property-related transactions worth a combined $130 million in which Bathla-linked or associated companies failed to complete purchases on time, prompting sellers to take legal action.

One of the company's biggest former lenders believes the company expanded too quickly, particularly in its later years, leaving it vulnerable when property market conditions deteriorated.

In October 2021, Mr Ryan entered into a put-and-call option agreement with a Bathla subsidiary, UPG 322.

It is a common arrangement that allows developers to secure land for a future purchase.

Bathla exercised its option about a year later, with a sale contract signed the following month.

But when the planned settlement date arrived in April 2023, Bathla failed to complete the purchase.

It missed further deadlines in May and October.

Mr Ryan then took the company to the NSW Supreme Court, which ruled that the purchase should complete that November.

Penny Cable, who heads the property group at McCabes Lawyers and represented Mr Ryan, said the repeated delays were frustrating, with one attempted settlement falling apart at the last minute.

"We were ready to go all day, and then at four o'clock they pulled the pin and said, 'Financier is not coming to the party,'" she said.

Court records on the case show that the Bathla-linked purchasing entity was having trouble securing the money needed to complete the sale to Mr Ryan.

After missing the court-ordered deadline in November 2023, Bathla's lawyers told Mr Ryan's solicitor that they had been unable to obtain the necessary finance.

Three months later, they presented the court with a term sheet from private credit firm Alceon that covered less than 60 per cent of the original purchase price. The document stated the proposal was not an offer of finance and was subject to conditions.

The judge described the evidence of the company's ability to complete the purchase as "flimsy and unconvincing".

He observed that Bhart Bhushan, Bathla's founder and a guarantor under the deal, had provided no explanation for his failure to comply with court orders to complete the sale, noting "this does not count in his favour"

At the same time as the funding delays, the wider Bathla group had reported more than $2.59 billion in assets and annual after-tax profits exceeding $62 million in 2021–22.

Brian Silvia, an insolvency specialist and principal of CasCap Advisory, said the apparent discrepancy could be down to cash flow as well as financing-related issues.

The eventual solution for Mr Ryan was to become a lender to the very company buying his land.

The judge, in a December 2023 ruling, said evidence of the wider group's reported financial position — and another subsidiary's $13.6 million property purchase while Mr Ryan was waiting to settle — raised questions about why Mr Bhushan had not arranged for UPG 322 to complete the sale.

Ms Cable said three other landowners had approached her after experiencing difficulties selling property to Bathla-related companies.

She said Bathla had offered attractive prices for land, but could leave sellers in a difficult position when deals failed to complete.

If sellers walked away, they could have potentially kept the deposits paid by Bathla. But it would also have meant finding another buyer in a weaker property market, possibly at a markedly lower price.

"It was really awful to see that it wasn't just my client, but then other people coming out to say this is happening to me as well," she said.

Court documents also reveal two further cases where Bathla could not pay.

In one, another Bathla subsidiary — UPG 318 — failed to complete a $20.6 million purchase for another Box Hill property.

The case was also taken to the NSW Supreme Court, and in September 2024, the court ordered the Bathla subsidiary to complete the purchase.

In another case, Raj & Jai (Mudgee) Pty Ltd defaulted on a $70 million agreement to acquire interests in a partly developed residential estate in regional NSW.

The purchaser was a subsidiary of Raj & Jai Construction, one of the companies that entered administration as part of the Bathla Group's collapse this August.

In June 2025, the NSW Supreme Court ordered the purchaser to complete the transaction, and directed it and its parent company to pay default interest.

Less than a month later, Raj & Jai (Mudgee) was renamed Mudgee Properties and entered liquidation.

The property at the centre of Mr Ryan's dispute was later mortgaged by Alceon, the same lender whose conditional proposal had earlier been presented to the court.

Land title documents show that in December 2024, Mr Ryan's mortgage was discharged, and on the same day, Alceon registered its own mortgage over the land.

By then, Alceon had been financing Bathla developments for about a decade.

Its co-founder, Trevor Loewensohn, said Bathla had been a good borrower, but in the latter years, Alceon believed it was expanding too quickly.

"They didn't know when to stop, didn't know when to slow down, when to allow themselves to digest if you want to call it that," he told the ABC.

"He was just buying more and more property, and we were trying to stop him from doing that.

"He was cash-flow tight; we probably had enough visibility to know he was pushing his luck."

Alceon had stepped up oversight of the developments it financed by late 2024, but Mr Loewnsohn said it had limited power to control Bathla's wider expansion.

In December 2025, Bathla had refinanced Alceon's full exposure of nearly $460 million, including the property at Hynds Road, Box Hill.

Insolvency specialist Mr Silvia said Bathla's repeated delays in settling land purchases, particularly when disputes ended up in court, could be a sign of deeper financial problems.

Bathla's own 2024-25 financial statements, the latest set available on ASIC, reveal the pressure on its cash flow.

Despite reporting a $62 million profit in 2024–25, the group recorded a $150 million operating cash outflow, while receiving $160 million in proceeds from borrowings.

"Irrespective of reporting profits, their cash flow is very tight," Mr Silvia said.

When Bathla entered voluntary administration in August 2026, managing director Bhart Bhushan blamed a "perfect storm" of slowing property sales, federal budget changes, falling market confidence and rising construction costs.

Bathla and Mr Bhushan were contacted for comment.

The Box Hill property at the centre of Mr Ryan's legal battle has since been subdivided.

Ten residential lots from the subdivision are now advertised for sale, with an auction scheduled at the end of October.

More than three years after Mr Ryan went to court to force Bathla to complete the purchase, part of that same land is back on the market, this time under the control of a receiver.