A quarter century long saga over the liquidation of the Bell Group of companies may have crossed one final legal hurdle, one that for once does not entangle the failed conglomerate's bankers as central actors.The High Court of Australia yesterday ruled to invalidate a 2015 law enacted by the Western Australian parliament, the Bell Group Companies (Finalisation of Matters and Distribution of Proceeds) Act 2015.All justices of the High Court agreed that the Bell Act was invalid in its entirety under section 109 of the Australian constitution, due to the inconsistency between provisions of the novel state law and provisions of the Commonwealth Income Tax Assessment Act and Taxation Administration Act. (Sec 109 states, in effect, that whenever there is any inconsistency between a State law and a Commonwealth law, the latter will prevail.)All the Bell group companies covered by the WA law were either in liquidation or deregistered. WA's State Government Insurance Commission, along with a cohort of domestic and international banks, were creditors of Bell, an entity that achieved infamy during the "WA Inc" era in the 1980s and 1990s and its ownership, successively, by interests aligned with Robert Holmes a Court and Alan Bond.The High Court summary of its judgment yesterday explained that the "purported legal operation and practical effect of the Bell Act is that the State of Western Australia collects, pools, and vests in a State authority, the property of each WA Bell Company. "The State then determines in its 'absolute discretion' who is paid an amount or has property transferred to or vested in them out of the pooled property (if anyone). "To the extent that the State chooses not to distribute the pooled property of the WA Bell Companies, the surplus vests in the State."The Australian government is a substantial creditor of the Bell companies in respect of taxation liabilities, and the Commonwealth, for once, challenged the validity of a state law. Two decades of court cases involving Bell Group and its banks ended in 2013, setting the scene for the WA government to seek to resolve final matters in a manner found by the High Court to be hopeless.