Luke Trickett is circling embattled Silver Chef

He is married to one of Australia’s most famous Olympic swimmers but this low-profile fund manager is now investing big in a troubled Brisbane company.

SILVER LINING

WHAT is Luke Trickett, low-profile fund manager and husband of high-profile Olympic champion swimmer Libby, up to in relation to kitchen equipment leasing company Silver Chef? City Beat readers might recall that a private equity consortium led by Next Capital is poised to buy out the company offering shareholders 70 cents a share.

Silver Chef, whose shares were trading above $8 about 18 months ago, has been fighting for survival after breaching debt covenants.

Luke Trickett pictured with wife Libby and their daughter Poppy in 2017. Pic Peter Wallis

Luke Trickett, a former champion swimmer himself and who runs a fund called the Blue Stamp Co, has been busy buying up shares in Silver Chef, amassing a 12.39 per cent stake as of this week. Interestingly some of the on-market purchases have been for as high as 71 cents, above what Next is offering as part of the buyout offer.

City Beat spies are now wondering whether Trickett is planning a counter bid and if so what is the value in Silver Chef that others obviously don’t see?

Luke Trickett competing in the 2008 Telstra Australian Swimming Championships.

After retiring from doing laps in the pool, Trickett had a brief career as a stockbroker at Wilson HTM before founding Blue Stamp in 2010. Silver Chef shareholders are set to vote on the privatisation scheme in late August. Trickett yesterday declined to comment on his plans for Silver Chef except to say Blue Stamp had been a shareholder for some time. Watch this space.

NEW SUPER MAN

THERE’S a new man in charge of the state’s biggest mountain of superannuation money. Charles Woodhouse has been appointed chief investment officer of QSuper, replacing Brad Holzberger who retires in September.

American-born Woodhouse joined QSuper in 2009 from the Queensland Investment Corporation where he ran the impressive sounding “alpha investments.”

The $113 billion QSuper fund has been experiencing a purple patch recently with superannuation rating agency Chant West last week placing it number one in performance over the past year and in the top four over the decade.

Woodhouse says it will be steady as she goes in relation to QSuper, with a strategy of investing in long-term bonds and infrastructure paying dividends.

AMBULANCE CALL

HELIMODS boss Will Shrapnel is off to Canada next month to check out how the aerospace company’s multimillion-dollar air ambulance contract is progressing.

The Sunshine Coast-based company has installed a push-button powered stretcher loading system on 11 helicopters operated by Ontario-based Orange, a not-for-profit organisation that co-ordinates the province’s air ambulance system.

HELIMODS

The patented technology allows a patient to be loaded and unloaded onto a helicopter without the need for manual lifting or to transfer the person to a specialised aeromedical stretcher. The system can load a patient weighing up to 300kg in 20 seconds.

Shrapnel gave a presentation to a conference on digitalisation organised by Siemens in Brisbane on Tuesday. Shrapnel says Helimods, which was named the Telstra Queensland Business of the Year in 2018, utilised Siemens technology in the design and operational phases of the project.

MILES TO GO

MORE memories of the early days of Mt Isa have been sparked by former MIM boss George Fishers’ posthumous induction into the Business Leaders Hall of Fame last week.

Carseldine reader Joan Bowman tells City Beat that her grandfather, James Tregenza, was the government assayer based in Cloncurry who determined the quality of the ore that prospector John Campbell Miles discovered in 1923 leading to the first mining activity in the Mt Isa area. Joan has a photograph of a plaque commemorating that discovery and her grandfather’s role in it and on a recent trip back to Mt Isa attempted to locate its whereabouts.

A view of the Mount Isa Mines (MIM), located on the edge of the outback city of Mount Isa.

Alas it appears to have been lost in the mists of time and even Glencore, the mine’s present owners don’t know where it is.

The plaque tells the story of how Miles was on his way back from Duchess to Camooweal along the road that now is Camooweal Street in Mount Isa after giving his horses a drink at a waterhole in the Leichhardt River.

His prospector’s curiosity was aroused by a ridge of rock and within hours he discovered what lay the foundation of the great mining enterprise of Mt Isa.