By Colin Kruger
It has been a mixed month for ex-Pac Brands boss Sue Morphett.
She was one of the Godfreys board members forced to leave the vacuum cleaner retailer a few weeks back with their tails between their legs after 99.9 year old Godfreys founder John Johnson knocked them out with a low-ball offer.
Sue MorphettCredit: John Shakespeare
Morphett was appointed just after the vacuum cleaner retailer's blighted November 2014 IPO at $2.75 a share.
It was all downhill for the Godfreys brains trust, and the only upside for Morphet is that she has 7272 shares to sell to Johnson at 32¢ a pop.
But the lady who did the hard yards cleaning up Pac Brands has had a much better run at Noni B which she joined not long after her start on the Godfreys' board.
She was brought in more than three years ago by Alceon - the investment shop set up by former Babcock & Brown gurus Phil Green and Trevor Loewensohn.
Noni B was struggling, and it says plenty about her perceived importance to the rebuild that Morphet’s stock incentives were not far off what Alceon offered the new CEO, Scott Evans.
Her stock incentives have proved to be as hot as the instore offerings from the suburban woman’s fashion retailer.
Alceon bought into Noni B at 51¢ a share. It offered Morphet a deal that would see her pick up 1.96 million share rights at the same price.
By the time she converted them into shares in December 2015, the stock was already above $1.
Morphet picked up another 100,000 shares last week at $2.50 a share as part of the latest capital raising to buy up a swathe of Specialty Fashion Group’s brands like Millers, Katies and Rivers.
Morphet's stock pot is now worth $7.4 million, her initial share options alone have delivered a $5 million bonanza.
It is one hell of a payday for someone who, unfairly or not, was remembered as the CEO who got a massive pay rise at Pac Brands while sacking thousands of workers to move its manufacturing base to China.
Pony up
The case has finally closed on our favourite pharmacist/colourful racing identity, Rohan Aujard.
The Australian Financial Security Authority (AFSA) confirmed this week that Aujard has been convicted of making false declarations in relation to his 2012 bankruptcy.
Illustration: John Shakespeare
Aujard paid costs of $183.29 to AFSA and was put on a $500 good behaviour bond for 12 months because - as the judge put it - he would be unable to pay a significant fine.
"The bottom line is you should have told the truth and you didn't, and now you are here facing criminal matters," said Magistrate Metcalfe.
The AFSA statement reported that Magistrate Metcalfe "took into account the delay from the time from the commission of the offences to prosecution, stating that a penalty more severe than a conviction bond was not appropriate".
Aujard is also considered unlikely to reoffend - which might be on the basis that you could only have one corporate collapse in your life that matches the spectacle of his Pulse Pharmacy debacle.
The good news is that the AFSA statement details some of the false declarations that got Aujard into trouble after he declared bankruptcy in 2012.
This includes the failure to declare he had been the owner of a property in Hawthorn, Victoria. Aujard also mistakenly told his trustee that Commonwealth Bank account held $179.37 balance, when it fact it was $101,263.14.
He also failed to declare that he handed the shares in horses he owned to Ballymore Stables - the Moroney family trainers who looked after Aujard's Group 1 winner Brazilian Pulse.
It was to settle payment of a $132,360.23 debt he owed to them.
Aujard's trustee, Norman Jones, was not available to say whether the pony stakes had been regathered from the Moroney clan. But it might explain why Aujard was forced to find gainful employment this month with another well-known crew - the Corsten family’s Malua Racing stable and Flemington Bloodstock - not Ballymore.
He also sold 70,000 shares in an undisclosed company for $42,263.04.
Aujard is currently expected to be discharged from bankruptcy on September 20, 2020.
Tax Trumped
While the storm rages on local shores to give our multi millionaires - and big business - the tax cuts they deserve, it is comforting to know that the scourge of rampant taxation still blights the land of the free.
Donald Trump seems determined to start a trade war. Credit: AP
State taxes in Donald Trump’s not-so United States accounts for a massive movement of economic refugees across state borders, and now it appears that the Aussie founders of Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners, Mike Dorrell and Trent Vichie, are joining the flight.
According to US reports, the Macquarie alumni are extending their $US15 billion infrastructure investment shop to Texas to avoid a potential rise in New York state taxes.
And would you believe Trump is to blame.
The US President’s tax overhaul is meant to include a $US10,000 cap on state tax deductions. Apparently this is a great way for high-flying executives to ease the pain of living in high taxing states like New York by writing of hundreds of thousands of dollars in property taxes and the like. Not any more.
Stonepeak did not comment on the Bloomberg report - based on a company memo - which said the firm is opening an office in Austin Texas. Dorrell and Vichie are among those looking to relocate their families to the Lone Star state.
They should feel at home in Austin, Macquarie also has an office there.
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