Patrick Fischer is the managing director of Creativity Capital. He is based in the United Kingdom and is a fan of Australian filmmakers.
About three years ago Fischer’s company lent more than $US1 million to a Queensland production company, headed by Steve Jaggi, which was the first local company to resume production after the pandemic lockdowns.
Over this period The Steve Jaggi Company was responsible for more than $30 million in production expenditure, on titles for Netflix, Disney and Network Ten.
Fischer lent The Steve Jaggi Company the money in the expectation that the project would receive the producer offset – a legislated tax incentive for screen production that rebates producers between 30 and 40 per cent of their production costs.
Based on the scheme’s 15 years of operation, both producer and financier had an expectation that the loan would be repaid within two or three months of the application being lodged.
“We were waiting to be paid out and then we start hearing from Steve that Screen Australia are short-staffed, and we said ‘Well, these things happen in the film industry’,” Fischer says.
“But then it became chronic. All of a sudden, we heard it could be six months, or another year, and when this is sprung on you as a financier this is going to wreak havoc on your deals.”
As a result of the time taken by Screen Australia to process Jaggi’s offset application, the loan from Fischer’s company was so late in being repaid that under the contract it triggered penalty conditions where default interest kicked in.
“We were trying to be nice because we could see it was beyond Steve’s control,” Fischer says, “but he was faced with the prospect of paying more money to keep the money out there for longer, and this was money that he didn’t need to pay.”