Former communications minister Mitch Fifield has been in his new gig — as Australia’s Ambassador to the UN — for a month.
Illustration: Matt GoldingCredit:
Unfortunately, his ambassadorial residence in New York’s swanky No. 1 Beekman Place, has been found to be something less than totally habitable.
The last time the Australian government upgraded one of the diplomatic homes it owns in the building, at the time occupied by former Victorian premier turned consul general Steve Bracks, the $1.5 million reno bill became front-page news.
The repairs to Fifield’s apartment are of a rather less luxurious kind — the electrical wiring and plumbing is so old it needs to be completely replaced. Fifield, meanwhile, has had to be placed in temporary accommodation while construction is under way.
He’s moving to the nearby Trump World Tower.
We should note that it’s not Trump Tower, the Midtown Manhattan high-rise, location of President Donald Trump’s penthouse (and the home of many of his business interests).
Trump World Tower, built in 2001 and briefly the world’s tallest residential building, is still controlled by Trump but many of the apartments are privately owned.
Department of Foreign Affairs officials told CBD Fifield’s apartment was being leased from a “private owner” and not the President.
As some observers have noted, Trump does like to keep presidential business close to his property portfolio — including conducting one-on-one diplomacy with Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida two years ago. Plans to host the G7 summit next year at his Trump National Doral golf resort were dropped after what Trump termed “Crazed and Irrational Hostility” from Democrats.
Perhaps having Fifield take up residence below Trump’s penthouse had some merit after all.
But as a DFAT spokesman told this column, the Trump World Tower apartment was chosen because “it represented value for money and is located close to the Australian Permanent Mission to the United Nations”.
The UN happens to be right across the road.
TWO STEPS FORWARD...
Former premier Barry O’Farrell, on the other hand, is preparing to depart for Australia’s High Commission in India after the ambassador Harinder Sidhu, calls it a day.
As the Financial Review reported this week, O’Farrell’s appointment has not been given the green light by cabinet as yet. That’s expected shortly.
We imagine that discussion will take place very soon, perhaps next week, considering O’Farrell yesterday signed off from all of his high-powered local appointments.
That’s required under public sector rules and needs to take place before approval.
O’Farrell last night farewelled the Wests Tigers board, where he has only been chairman since March, and Racing Australia, where he has been chief executive since 2017. He’s also gone as trustee to the Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground Trust, where he has had a seat since 2016 and a month after acting Sports Minister Geoff Lee plugged all the vacancies … including rubber stamping O’Farrell’s re-appointment.
BREAKING BREAD
Ellerston Capital chairman and former Packer family lieutenant Ashok Jacob yesterday received the all clear from his board to take the outfit’s listed Ellerston Global Investors fund off the ASX.
It was, we hear, something that was three months in the making. Previous attempts at raising the share price so it matched the much higher value of the fund’s assets — a lengthy share buy back — had not been successful.
But in the midst of the deliberations about moving the $120 million fund off the stock market, veteran investor and former Rothschild banker David Kingston decided to intervene, complaining directly to Jacob about the fund’s poor performance in a letter later obtained by the Herald.
It wasn’t Kingston’s only intervention into listed investment funds.
As we reported last week, former Platinum Funds Management operator Jacob Mitchell’s new outfit Antipodes Global Investment had its investor relations team call around major shareholders in a bid to gauge their mood.
That mood became clear on Wednesday — scheduled to run for 25 minutes — when Kingston turned up at the fund’s AGM at Macquarie Street’s Mint. The meeting ran for an hour.
But as Ellerston was announcing its plan to take EGI off the ASX yesterday, Jacob was on his way to meet Kingston at the former banker’s Aurora Place private offices. It was by all accounts a very positive encounter, certainly more positive than the one Mitchell received the previous day.
Still, when he’s raking in almost $7 million in management fees despite a 15 per cent slide in share price, we’re not feeling too sorry for him.