Off the Record: SA pays Lance a lot for Tour Down Under and he laughs it up
In this week’s Off the Record, find out how much extra disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong got paid for his second Tour Down Under, plus the very Adelaide business and political overlap involving the Premier, some friends and a certain Wok in a Box.
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In this week’s Off the Record, find out how much extra disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong got paid for his second Tour Down Under, plus the very Adelaide business and political overlap involving Premier Steven Marshall, some friends and a certain Wok in a Box.
SA pays Lance a lot and he laughs it up
History’s worst – or best, depending on how you look at it – cycling drug cheat Lance Armstrong banked a 30 per cent pay increase for his second appearance at the Tour Down Under.
The 10-year confidentiality agreement on Armstrong’s contract to race in the 2010 Tour lapsed this week and showed Armstrong was paid $US1.3 million to turn up in South Australia.
He was paid a flat $US1 million for his efforts in 2009, when he returned from retirement to pal around with former premier Mike Rann and TDU director Stuart O’Grady.
There were also a few other sweeteners included in the juicy contract, which has been released by Treasurer Rob Lucas.
Armstrong also received two first-class return airfares, hotel accommodation and reimbursement for reasonable travel, food and other incidental expenses.
It’s not known how much that added up to but the first-class return airfares to Adelaide from Armstrong’s home in Austin, Texas could have added a further $40,000 to the taxpayers’ bill, even though the cyclist reportedly used a private jet.
Despite being outed as a drug cheat in 2012 and admitting his seven Tour de France titles were chemically assisted, there is no chance the TDU money will be repaid.
Armstrong did repay $US5 million to former sponsor US Postal and was ordered to repay Tour de France prizemoney but no “morals” clause was included in his TDU contract.
Wok’s going on ’ere then?
There’s barely more than one degree of separation in the South Australian business world, yet rarely do the corporate and political spheres so neatly overlap.
After a year of tumult well documented by The Advertiser, the $50 million SA Venture Capital Fund is back on an even keel, with Sydney-based Artesian taking over its management.
At the helm locally is David Rohrsheim, a supremely well-credentialled appointment with a name that might ring a bell.
David is one of the Rohrsheim brothers, with older brother Geoff a close friend of Premier Steven Marshall.
Geoff is a member of Marshall’s Economic Advisory Council, a director of ASC and also a tenant at the Lot Fourteen start-up incubator, where brother David and colleague Alexandra Grigg will be working post corona-crisis. David himself is also well-acquainted with our premier.
His Linkedin profile documents exactly why he’s perfect for the new gig – he spent more than seven years at Uber, spearheading its push into Australia and New Zealand as regional general manager.
Before that, he was a San Francisco-based analyst with Draper Fisher Jurvetson working in start-up venture sourcing, due diligence and portfolio management, and was at Bain and Co for two years before that.
But of most interest for SA readers would be his short stint as an operations manager/assistant to the CEO of an unnamed Wok in a Box franchisee. You guessed it! That franchisee was our very own premier, who was grilled by Labor attack dog Tom Koutsantonis before the 2014 election over the success or otherwise of his Wok in a Box businesses. Kouts failed to land a solid punch over the issue, which was a bit of a non-issue really.
As for the VC fund, it’s well outside Marshall’s realm of influence and Rohrsheim appears to have not even been involved with Artesian when it gained status as the leading bidder. And he’s eminently qualified to boot.
– Cameron England
SA roll call
A who’s who of the South Australian political and legal community has joined the board of the Menzies Centre, the Liberal Party’s national think tank.
Former finance minister, SA senator and Liberal Right powerbroker Nick Minchin, who is now based in Melbourne, headlines the list.
His one-time SA colleague Trish Worth, a former Liberal federal vice-president, was also among an influx of eight (five with SA connections) to the Canberra-based think tank’s 14-person board.
Former Mayo candidate Georgina Downer is another, as is Meredith Jackson, once-chief of staff to former defence minister Christopher Pyne.
The final SA board member is Adrian Tembel, the chief executive partner of Thomson Geer Lawyers, whose network also includes Labor connections.
Space invaders
Even the pomp and ceremony of traditional parliamentary ceremonies are being curtailed in the name of appropriate social distancing.
Usually, Parliament would have had to play a game of sardines in the cramped Legislative Council chamber on Tuesday.
The Upper House would have hosted both its usual quota of members, plus visitors from the Lower House, to confirm Nicola Centofanti as its newest member.
That would have meant 69 MPs at close quarters but the event now will go ahead with significantly modified rules to ensure MPs are distanced.
Centofanti replaces former Legislative Council president Andrew McLachlan, pictured, who moved to the Senate and was sworn in last month in the traditional manner.
Decorum takes a tumble
The executive crowd are usually pretty well behaved when it comes to sharing their thoughts on social media, but just a couple of weeks into the coronavirus shutdown we’re already starting to see standards slip.
So far we’ve seen the odd F-bomb drop from figures you’d usually think would keep such comments offline, people – rightly in this column’s opinion – being called out for a lack of social distancing measures – and building calls for China to pay for the outbreak.
Social media is a curious space, being quasi-private in theory, although we’ve all come to realise that in practice it is anything but that.
A global health crisis doesn’t change the fact that once the dust has settled, we’ll all be held to account for what we’ve said during these tough times.
On the other side of the ledger, if a few harsh words help drill the “stay at home” message into some stubborn heads, that’s probably a good outcome.
