The fallout from the 1980s echoes 30 years on.Litigation surrounding the late Alan Bond's failed Bell Group is a make-work scheme for many.Delay defines the earnest, endless court appearances of every western hayseed and legal leech clinging onto life support amid the decay of Bond's conglomerate.Time equals money, making the issue of where best to be positioned in the creditor's queue once the guillotine finally falls a matter worth fighting over.Rival, uncompromising managers of capital wrangle over a cesspool of claim and counterclaim in the courts over Bell Group leavings. Bell was once an owner of Australian breweries such as Swan and indulgences such as the Sydney Hilton, among other things.Neil McKerracher is a justice with the Federal Court of Australia and a narrator on the state of play in a matter he was too discreet to suggest faces another five or ten years of court time.A matrix of squabbles over creditor priority, beginning with the question of how much tax needs to be made whole, is the essence of it all.Twenty-seven years after Bell's collapse, the McKerracher proceeding is just one more in the stubborn warren of life after Bond and Bell.It will be ten years next month since Supreme Court justice Neville Owen - after five years work - found against the banks but failed to end the matter."Who should have access to the Bell Group Finance asset pool, and in what proportions, are issues centrally focused in the Supreme Court Bell proceedings," McKerracher wrote in a judgment late last week."This Federal Court proceeding is but one part of that bigger question. While the risk of conflicting factual findings may presently be low, it makes no sense to have this particular issue dealt with separately from the bigger question on foot in the Supreme Court of Western Australia."Did Michael Edwards and Alan Bond concoct company records of an equity holding as everything else unravelled for the mastermind of it all? Both are deceased and supporting evidence contested.BGUK's case is that meetings of its directors in fact occurred between 1 September and 10 November 1989 at which resolutions in terms of those recorded in the minutes of December 1988/January 1989 were passed, the judge outlined. Those minutes, the judge said, "apparently confirm that the only attendees at those meetings were Mr Alan Bond and Mr Michael Edwards. Both men are now deceased. "I say 'apparently' as one cannot eliminate entirely the possibility of other witnesses who were not recorded in the relevant minutes."Way back in 2008, Owen found, in summary, Owen found that Bell Group was insolvent at a critical date in January 1990; that the directors did not necessarily know that but breached director's duties nonetheless; and that the banks did not necessarily know that, but obtained benefits from Bell at the expense of other creditors nonetheless.Owen ruled that banks were liable, though not as liable as the liquidators would like, giving rise to many present items of litigation.One outcome of Owen's ruling was that banks have standing