Almost half of corporate Australia has decamped to Shanghai this weekend for the booze-up/networking phenomenon that is the now annual Port Adelaide versus St Kilda AFL match on Sunday.
But we’re reliably informed AFL boss Gillon McLachlan has bigger concerns.
No, not leading the AFL’s own trade mission and trying to smooth diplomatic waters between Australia and China. Nor to find another au pair. Not even signing mega-sponsorship deals with Chinese companies wanting to advertise their wares to everywhere except NSW and Queensland.
Instead, we hear that Gill and his mate and sidekick Tim Worner, the Seven West Media boss, have been frantically trying to figure out how they will watch the horse racing from Caulfield on Saturday afternoon.
It turns out their star horse Live and Free (named after Seven’s tagline it uses during sport broadcasts) is going around in race 9 and the mad punting pair are desperate to watch. Worner, we’re told, has overcome his technophobic tendencies, and is confident he can tune in online via his beloved Racing.com service. Here’s hoping his VPN works.
Another owner — fund manager David Paradice, worth $599 million on The (ahem) Stensholt List — will be watching from Denver, while the more handsome and witty of the McLachlan clan, Hamish McLachlan, will be around the traps.
While the horse is favourite, Margin Call just hopes the fact Live and Free takes part in race 9, wearing number 9 and having drawn barrier 9 doesn’t mean it runs 9th.
Others taking in the Shanghai scene include another Seven personality in Port Adelaide president David Koch, who is hosting another Stensholt List member in St Kilda President Andrew Bassat, the Seek boss.
Also expected along are Foxtel boss Patrick Delany (who has told us he wants a horse called “No Ad Breaks”), steel man and Port sponsor Sanjeev Gupta, Victorian governor Linda Dessau — a former AFL commissioner — and the state’s trade minister Martin Pakula (who doubles as racing minister), as well as South Australian deputy premier Vickie Chapman and our ambassador to China, Jan Adams.
Then there is the star-studded AFL commission, boasting the likes of chairman Richard Goyder, who has the same role at Qantas, BGH founding partner Robin Bishop and Seek co-founder Paul Bassat.
Horsing around
Staying with the sport of kings, McLachlan and Worner’s big rival in race 9 at Caulfield seems to be the James Cummings-trained Morton’s Fork. The horse is part of the giant Godolphin stabled owned by Dubai ruler Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
Sheik Mohammed famously and finally broke through with a win in last year’s Melbourne Cup with Cross Counter, but financial accounts recently lodged with the corporate regulator show just how costly his Australian horse racing operations are.
Godolphin Australia made an operating loss of $32m for the year to December 31, which was even more than the $27m loss racked up in 2017 — though that year it also wrote down $33m in biological (ie horse) assets for a $60m net loss.
Of course, Sheik Mohammed has rather deep pockets — as Godolphin’s horse racing wins around the world prove. But Godolphin’s accounts for Australia reveal just how much he has spent since splashing out $500m in 2018 to buy the local horse racing empire of Bob Ingham and his family.
The sheik has racked up another $708m in accumulated losses in 11 years, bringing the total bill to more than $1.2 billion. An amount of more than $1.1bn is recorded in the Godolphin balance sheet as being owed to its owner, though we don’t think the sum will be called in any time soon.
Gone to Grounds
As if the move by James Packer (wealth of $4.23bn for 15th position on The first-to-publish Stensholt List) to sell a cool $1.76bn worth of stock in his Crown Resorts casino empire wasn’t intriguing enough.
Just have a look at who did — or in this case, didn’t — do the deal for him.
Thursday night’s deal was done in-house, with no external investment bankers used and Packer’s in-house man Guy Jalland, the boss of his Consolidated Press Holdings in Australia, sorting out the details.
Which means Packer’s one-time favourite in local UBS boss Matthew Grounds still remains on the outer with the billionaire.
The slight twist is it was only back in early April when UBS (and Goldman Sachs, which Packer has previously used when he wasn’t speaking to Grounds) was working for Crown when Steve Wynn’s Wynn Resorts looked at a takeover bid for Crown. It seemed a surprise at the time.
But that appointment was by the Crown board, not Packer. Crown boss John Alexander is said to still be a fan of Grounds, and Crown chief financial officer Ken Barton and another star UBS banker in Kelvin Barry have a good relationship.
But not Packer and Grounds. Margin Call hears the duo ran into each other on the ski slopes of Aspen a few months back — and the brief chat was not necessarily pleasant.
And given Packer’s sale was for $1.76bn in shares, a helping out fee of, say, 1 per cent would have been worth a good $17m. Alas, bankers like Grounds will not see the healthy cheque going their way this time.
You be the judge
Kenneth Hayne sidekick Michael Hodge QC could be headed for the big seat at the front of the courtroom, if the Federal Court’s John Middleton is any judge (which he is, by definition).
As counsel assisting the banking royal commission Hodge performed a crowd-pleasing slice-and-dice of NAB chief executive Andrew Thorburn and the bank’s chairman Ken Henry that left them dead men walking, but these days the QC is back at his old job working the commercial bar.
Musical theatre performer Hodge was appearing before Middleton — who’s also a pretty handy singer — on Friday on behalf of Rod Sims’ ACCC, which is trying to stop telcos Vodafone and TPG from merging.
Unfortunately, almost no one at the bar table put their hand up as available when the judge suggested they bring the case on for hearing in September.
Is there something on in Italy at that time of year?
Never mind, said Middleton. Anything could happen.
“We could get Mr Hodge to the bench, for example, and he would not be available.”
Hodge blushed, but there was no denial.
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