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Clive Palmer paid $250,000 to fly mystery Kyrgyz woman to Singapore

Clive Palmer has told a court there was nothing personal about his relationship with a woman for whom he paid $250,000 to fly to from Kyrgyzstan to Singapore in a private jet.

The former federal MP was back in the Federal Court on Thursday to be grilled by liquidators who are now winding up his Queensland Nickel business, which has debts of about $300 million.

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But he bristled and directed his lawyer to object when barrister Walter Sofronoff QC, for liquidators FTI Consulting, began to quiz him about his relationship with a woman named Evgenia Bednova, how often he'd met her, and where.

Mr Sofronoff wanted to know why Mr Palmer's company Mineralogy had paid a quarter of a million dollars to fly her privately from her homeland to Singapore in 2011, where Mr Palmer was attending a Forbes business conference.

"Do you recall chartering a jet to fly to Kyrgyzstan and pick here up and fly her to Singapore?" Mr Sofronoff asked.

"I don't know, it would have been done by our staff," Mr Palmer replied.

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"Do you recall the jet arriving in Singapore and you meeting her at the airport?" the barrister asked.

"I don't recall, no," Mr Palmer said.

"Do you recall she was the only passenger on that jet?" Mr Sofronoff continued, reminding Mr Palmer that this was a woman he'd "paid $1 million to".

Earlier the court was told the $1 million was for work Ms Bednova had been doing to explore mineral opportunities for Mineralogy in Kyrgyzstan.

Mr Palmer became angry at that point, saying it wasn't Queensland Nickel's money, the questions were not about its affairs, and demanded his lawyer to object, but Registrar Murray Belcher allowed the questions.

Asked again why he paid such a large amount of money for Ms Bednova's private flight, Mr Palmer said it was about keeping workers safe, as Kyrgyzstan's national airline had just one plane, and that ended up crashing killing more than 100 people.

Mr Palmer held press conferences on his way into and out of court on Friday.

On the way in, he said nickel refinery workers in Townsville should be thankful to him for buying the troubled plant in 2009, and giving them seven extra years of employment before they lost their jobs last year.

On the way out, when reporters asked about the nature of his relationship with Ms Bednova, he said: "I don't have one."

"She was our representative in Kyrgyzstan ... I don't get any of these questions of whether I've got a homosexual relationship with a member of our staff anywhere."

Mr Palmer's wife Anna, also gave evidence on Thursday, about a deal she authorised that lumbered the ailing nickel company with $135 million worth of new debt, five days before it went into administration.

AAP