City Beat: Gold Coast Suns chair Tony Cochrane has wound up one of his entertainment companies

A leading Queensland sport and entertainment titan has pulled the plug on a mortally wounded part of his business empire.

SETBACK FOR EVENT PROMOTER

A leading sport and entertainment titan in Queensland over the past 45 years has pulled the plug on a mortally wounded part of his business empire.

Tony Cochrane, the former rock promoter who now chairs the Gold Coast Suns, and his co-directors at International Entertainment Consulting Pty Ltd wound up the company this week.

The board, which included Cochrane’s missus, Thea, and Sirromet Wines founder Terry Morris, tapped two operatives at accounting mob Grant Thornton in Sydney to handle the liquidation duties.

Tony Cochrane

The move follows the appointment of a receiver over IEC earlier this month by one of the company’s secured lenders.

Industry heavyweights - including concert promoter and Ticketek owner TEG Live, which had a substantial stake in the business - are among those caught out by the collapse.

LIKE A ROLLING STONE

Launched in 2013 with $3m in paid capital, IEC described itself as “being the leading originators in entertainment and touring exhibitions’’.

Arguably its biggest project was pulling together a vast retrospective about The Rolling Stones.

The exhibit, which included about 500 objects from the archives of Mick and boys, opened in London in 2016 and then toured about a dozen cities around the world, including Sydney two years ago.

Despite IEC’s demise, Cochrane still lords over his Cochrane Entertainment Group, as well as chairing the Aus-X Open dirt biking business and the International World Exhibition and Festival Organization.

The Rolling Stones pose during a preview of 'The Rolling Stones: Exhibitionism' in London in 2016 with Tony and Thea Cochrane

Getting a start in the 1970s, he made a name for himself as a tour backer for such greats as the Stones, John Farnham and Olivia Newton-John, as well as late stars Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. Cochrane also oversaw musicals and other theatre productions

Along the way he earned a stack of awards and spent 15 years as chairman of V8 Supercars.

Cochrane’s LinkedIn page claims that over the course of his career he has “produced and promoted over 400 sporting and entertainment events throughout the world, sold in excess of 25 million tickets with gross sales exceeding $2bn and written nearly $250m in sponsorship sales.’’

Cochrane blamed IEC’s crash on the pandemic when City Beat rang for a chat but declined to reveal how much money he had lost.

FLOOD VICTIM WIN

As the 10th anniversary of the devastating 2011 floods approaches next month, nearly 7000 Brisbane victims who joined the class action lawsuit against dam operators got some good news this week.

No, there’s still no settlement in the drawn-out dispute.

But legal eagle Rebecca Gilsenan, the Maurice Blackburn operative spearheading the case for the plaintiffs, revealed that victims will not have any eventual payout reduced as a result of financial assistance they received at the time from state or national governments.

Rebecca Gilsenan

Plenty of those flooded got substantial sums from then-Premier Anna Bligh’s disaster relief fund, which raised more than $230m largely from public donations.

The National Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements scheme also doled out funds to help victims recover.

Gilsenan described the court’s decision as “a significant victory’’ even as further mediation talks this month failed to yield a deal.

Flood victims scored a landmark legal win late last year when the NSW Supreme Court ruled that state-owned dam entities Seqwater and SunWater were negligent in their operation of Wivenhoe Dam.

Compensation could be as high as $1bn but both Seqwater and SunWater appealed the decision.

[e-mail]