Australia’s Richest 250: Frank Lowy reaps a billion dollar harvest
These days Frank Lowy spends much of his time in Tel Aviv but he still gets nostalgic for the country where he made his mark.
It seems that Frank Lowy is the least surprised person of all regarding his decision to spend much of his time in Tel Aviv these days.
The billionaire co-founder of the shopping centre giant Westfield says he has for decades felt nostalgic whenever he returned to Sydney after travelling overseas, coming back to the country where he was such a big success in business and made such a mark in public life.
“I always remember arriving in 1952 and the warm welcome I got from everyone, including my new workmates, despite being a ‘New Australian’ with a funny accent,” he recalls.
These days, though, Lowy has retired and spends most of the year out of Australia. There’s the home in Tel Aviv he shares with his wife Shirley; the superyacht Ilona, which moves between various Mediterranean ports in the northern summer; children, grand-children and great-grandchildren to visit in the US; and a home in New York.
THE LIST: Australia’s Richest 250
The bustling Israeli city of Tel Aviv is where Lowy spends a great portion of his time. It is now more than two years since he pulled off one last big corporate deal after a lifetime among the Australian business elite, when he engineered the $US24.7 billion ($32 billion) sale of Westfield to the French company Unibail-Rodamco in December 2017.
Then there was the $815 million sale of the remainder of the Lowy family stake in Scentre Group, the owner of Westfield centres in Australia and New Zealand, last October. It meant a complete exit from the retail sector in which Frank made his fame and fortune, by which time he had already moved to Tel Aviv and been quoted as having “made Aliyah” – referring to the immigration of Jews to Israel – by The Times of Israel.
It was a homecoming of sorts, given Lowy, who was born in a small town in what is now Slovakia, survived the Holocaust in Hungary before heading to Palestine as a 15-year-old on an illegal boat, saw in the birth of the new Israeli state and later moved to Australia. Just don’t imagine that he has retired and is living some sort of reclusive existence, which people in Australia could find surprising, as Lowy – who speaks fluent Hebrew – stresses when asked what his “retirement” is actually like. “I came to Israel as a refugee when a teenager and fought in the War of Independence, so I have deep connections to this country, and with my personal and family circumstances these days it makes sense to spend more time here,” he says. “I keep very active. I chair a think tank – the Institute of National Security Studies (INSS) – and that keeps me incredibly up to date with all of the geopolitical issues in this part of the world.
“I’m also involved with local philanthropy; I’m honorary chairman of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and a number of philanthropic activities. I also have a wide circle of friends from all walks of life, so my life is very full.”
A scan of the social pages in the Israeli press shows how entrenched Lowy has become in local life. In January he appeared at a concert in honour of him and his wife alongside friend and former prime minister Ehud Olmert, just after he had travelled to Jerusalem to attend a cocktail reception in honour of Australian Governor-General David Hurley.
There was also a speaking appearance at the Tel Yitzhak kibbutz in central Israel for a Holocaust remembrance event on January 27 and the INSS’s annual conference in Tel Aviv in February, to name just a couple of the events Lowy has been spotted at.
Yet he is keen to stress he is something of a citizen of the world, given he has homes on three continents and is able to travel between each of them. There is always the long-time family home on Sydney harbour, in Point Piper, to come back to, for example, and the Lowy Institute think tank based in Sydney is still extremely important to him and his family.
“Of course Australia is and always will be central to me,” he says. “I have my permanent home in Sydney, and the global headquarters of our private company – the Lowy Family Group – is in Sydney. I’m in almost daily communication with Sydney and I still spend a lot of time there. But these days my large family is spread around the world so I also spend time in New York and in Europe, for personal reasons but also for business.”
In that way, he is similar to many members of The List, including the person at the very top, billionaire Anthony Pratt. The cardboard box and recycling magnate has the family home, the historic Raheen, in Melbourne but also spends much of his time at the penthouse atop the Sherry-Netherland hotel, which faces Central Park in New York’s Upper East Side. He and his family also own a residence in Westchester outside New York, bought for a reported $15 million from actors Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones last July.
For Pratt, it is a case of mixing business with family life, given his Pratt Industries is growing in America and Visy dominates its market in Australia. He is the head of both.
There are 27 members of The List based overseas, ranging from the likes of James Packer in Los Angeles to Michael Hintze in London, Ivan Glasenberg in Switzerland and tech boss Aram Mirkazemi in San Diego. Nicole Kidman owns property in Nashville and Sydney.
Some, like Altium chief executive Mirkazemi and Dicker Data boss David Dicker, who is officially domiciled in the United Arab Emirates, run ASX-listed companies and therefore spent at least some time in Australia. Andrew Budzinski is similar, given that he lives in Cyprus but owns the Sydney-based International Capital Markets foreign-exchange broker.
Others have Australian citizenship from their time studying here, including New York-based Israeli Ori Allon, who attended universities in Melbourne and Sydney before heading overseas to seek his fortune. Chinese property magnate Hui Wing Mau gained citizenship while undertaking an MBA at the University of South Australia in the early 1990s.
Whatever the circumstances, most have deep connections to Australia – be it emotional or business. In Lowy’s case, it is both.
“Even years ago, coming home to Sydney was always nostalgic,” he says. “And of course seeing the Westfield sign still shining out from Sydney Tower makes me very proud about what my family and I were able to achieve there.”
More Coverage
