Richard White’s sex scandal ignored by WiseTech-linked media startup

The scandal engulfing WiseTech and its billionaire founder Richard White – involving a messy legal battle with his former Double Bay wellness entrepreneur girlfriend Linda Rogan, a dispute over a $13.1 million Vaucluse love nest, and as revealed by this masthead, further alleged inappropriate behaviour by Australia’s 11th richest person – has been about as engrossing (and salacious) a business story as we’ve seen in a long time.

Which is why the lack of interest shown in this story by upstart bespoke business publication Capital Brief is all the more intriguing. As the details of White’s break-up with former lover Linda Rogan were aired out in a Federal Court bankruptcy dispute and picked over by much of the media, Capital Brief, founded by former Fairfax alums Chris Janz and David Eisman last year, remained oddly quiet.

WiseTech Global founder and CEO Richard White.Credit: Oscar Colman

The last mention of White, or his logistics software empire WiseTech, came in August, back when the business was celebrating stellar annual results, recording yearly revenue of $1 billion.

But that puffy coverage remained the media company’s last mention of WiseTech through White’s courtroom battles, until the silence was finally broken on Monday. To be fair, once you’ve been called “the LinkedIn lecher” on the frontpage of three newspapers, and $5 billion has been wiped off your valuation in a matter of hours, nobody can look away.

But why the reluctance from Capital Brief in the first place? Could it have anything to do with the firm getting funding from Shearwater Capital, a VC firm founded by early WiseTech investors? Shearwater’s co-founder Charles Gibbon is still a non-executive director of WiseTech. So was fellow founding partner Mike Gregg, until 2022.

Not so, Capital Brief editor John McDuling told us.

“No, investors have no involvement in our newsroom. We were beaten on the story. Simple as that,” McDuling said.

Not that those investors would mind Capital Brief getting beaten to a yarn all that much. Australia’s tech and venture capital scenes are full of hypersensitive sooks who regularly take to LinkedIn to whinge about media coverage that doesn’t massage their egos.

Capital Brief seems a little sympathetic to their view.

In a recent LinkedIn post, Shearwater founder Zac Zavos dismissed a sharp-elbowed column from our friends at the Financial Review’s Rear Window about Melbourne tech unicorn Linktree, which he dissed as an “attack piece”. Zavos urged his followers to subscribe to Capital Brief instead.

HUMAN FIGHTS WATCH

To Amnesty International Australia, where human rights activism and fighting for the downtrodden has taken a back seat to acrimonious squabbling and settling personal scores.

Next month, the organisation will gather for an extraordinary general meeting with just two agenda points. The first is a motion to remove former Labor MP Belinda Neal from the national board. CBD regulars would recall Neal, still best known for an alleged incident at Gosford nightspot Iguana Joe’s, was elected to the board last year on her fifth attempt.

But just over a year into her three-year term, Neal faces removal. And while the details of her removal remain confidential, we hear her recent election to Central Coast Council doesn’t vibe with the organisation’s constitution, which states that a member can’t run for political office. Past members who’ve run for office rescinded their membership first.

Seeking Amnesty: Anti-Chinese Communist Party advocate Drew Pavlou.Credit: AAP

The second agenda point is a resolution to readmit as a member anti-Chinese Communist Party advocate and inveterate poo-stirrer Drew Pavlou. Pavlou’s history with the organisation is bordering on the Sisyphean. Last year, he was expelled in the fallout from Amnesty’s infamously intemperate nine-hour annual meeting.

He successfully challenged that expulsion, only to be booted again this year, for reasons he insists are “entirely invented”, and linked to his social media commentary on X, where he’s regularly (and we mean, regularly) posting up a storm about the war in the Middle East, criticising progressive supporters of Palestine.

In an expulsion letter seen by CBD, Amnesty International manager Katie Wood accused Pavlou of breaching the charter by making a series of posts that were “discriminatory, aggressive and homophobic”.

Pavlou told CBD the posts were an online joke about getting locked in a gay nightclub, intending to mock toxic masculine influencers, which someone at Amnesty took out of context.

“Kamala Harris talks about the politics of joy and Amnesty is trying to punish me for my humour and joy and my gayness in the old-fashioned sense of the term,” he thundered.

Pavlou also offered up a few more shots at the organisation, which he described as run by a “left-wing clique”, along with some other commentary about its leadership that our lawyers would prefer we didn’t print.

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