By Lucy Macken and Madeleine Heffernan
As status symbols go among Sydney’s cashed-up Mandarin speakers, owning Indulgence magazine would have to rank as a fairly good one. The glossy quarterly is, after all, pitched as “the only magazine designed exclusively for wealthy Chinese tourists, business travellers, professionals and high-net-worth individuals living in Australia”.
What could be better? A trophy home, of course. And so it is that Linge Dai has rounded out his discretionary spending to include the $55 million beachfront house in Rose Bay sold by recycled shopping bag businessman Frank Qiang Geng and Juanjuan Zhao.
Architect Bruce Stafford designed the Rose Bay house that recently sold for $55 million.Credit: Domain
Alas for Dai, the 62-year-old might have maintained a level of relative anonymity among Sydney’s media proprietors if not for his purchase of recent months, revealed on publicly available title records and expected to settle later this year.
Home owners juggling interest rates and cost-of-living expenses will be heartened to know the Rose Bay house is the highest sale price of the year so far.
Better yet, Dai can now put aside any need to renovate the doer-upper he bought a year ago for $24.5 million in Vaucluse.
Ximi Media, which bought Indulgence in 2021, is one of three subsidiaries of Ximi Group, all with their own worthy, but fairly impenetrable, descriptions.
There’s Ximi Fashion, which is billed “an affordable luxury fashion brand bringing creative ideas of different independent designers”. There’s Ximi Education, which “focuses on the integration of creativity, experimentation, innovation, critical thinking and risk-taking, with an open and innovative attitude, to provide a diverse and international art and design educational environment for the young generation”. Whatever that means.
Meanwhile, Geng and Zhao won’t be left without shelter. They’re off to Point Piper where a year ago they agreed to pay about $82 million for the Rockleigh mansion owned by medical specialist Philippa Harvey-Sutton.
Google school rankings going, going, gone
In the big wide world of Google, people can review everything from ice-cream shops to parks – even brothels.
School reviews and ratings have become too fruity for Google.Credit: Getty Images
But as of next week, reviews and ratings for schools will disappear on Google. The search engine giant – remember its old motto, “don’t be evil”? – has told schools the change is designed to prevent “unhelpful or prank reviews”. Not to mention defamatory remarks about staff and students.
From April 30, existing reviews or ratings of schools will be removed and users will not be able to submit new ones.
With 4.12 million school students across Australia, things can get fruity in Google reviews. While many parents use the ratings and comments to inform their enrolment decisions, reviews that are ancient, anonymous and just plain weird are not uncommon.
“Obviously, the star ratings have a big impact on [school] credibility,” says Tim Nelson of school marketing business Look Education.
“When people are searching for schools, and they might not know a lot about the school, and they see two stars, they’re immediately thinking, ‘What’s going on here? What’s wrong?’” Nelson says. “And in a lot of the cases it was just students trolling or past students.”
But what will the keyboard warriors do now? Nelson says they’ll move on to other platforms such as Facebook and Reddit.
Google being Google, CBD couldn’t get someone on the phone to talk further.
Donations like child’s play
Mystery donations are everywhere this federal election campaign. And why wouldn’t they be, when nobody needs to declare who has been giving them cash until February next year?
The Labor Party is trying to spin their undisclosed funds into a good thing by gamifying the whole experience.
Subscribers to the party’s community outreach emails have been given the “rare opportunity” of drumming up donations.
Some anonymous donor will shell out $50,000 if another $50,000 is raised from supporters who click on the little red $25, $50 and $100 buttons.
If it fails, we guess they’ll take their moneybags elsewhere. If it succeeds, we’ll be able to reveal the identity next February.
We’ll have more fun with this next election, when the new disclosure laws kick in, requiring donors declare themselves to the Australian Electoral Commission within seven days.
‘Not without its challenges’
CBD is loath to debase itself by weighing in on matters relating to local government, but when our elected representatives use ratepayers’ money to get up to all manner of foolishness, we’re left with little alternative.
Liverpool Council is facing an investigation from the Office of Local Government, with public hearings set to kick off in June promising to air plenty of dirty laundry. The council faces serious cashflow problems to the tune of millions. That isn’t helped by the council spending more than $300,000 worth of ratepayers’ money dealing with complaints between councillors.
Liverpool Mayor Ned Mannoun.Credit: Steven Siewert
And, of course, last year, chief executive and former Liberal MP John Ajaka was controversially ousted following a falling-out with Mayor Ned Mannoun. He was the 10th person to hold that $500,000-a-year gig in eight years.
That problem is, for now, solved, with the council last week appointing acting CEO Jason Breton to the role permanently. Breton is a former detective who presided over a controversial investigation into the alleged pack rape of a 20-year-old woman by Bulldogs NRL players at a Coffs Harbour resort in 2004. No charges were laid.
Breton gets on pretty well with the mayor. He and Mannoun are good mates. The ex-cop ran as an independent in the 2021 council elections and is likely to help harvest preferences for the Liberal mayor.
“Taking over as the CEO of Liverpool City Council in NSW is a huge responsibility – and not without its challenges,” Breton said, in a rather epic understatement.
with Kishor Napier-Raman
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