All eyes on Crown and Alexander

Cartoon: Rod Clement.

How much microscopic attention can Crown executive chairman John Alexander bear?

On Thursday morning the boss of the James Packer-controlled $8.2bn gaming empire will face shareholder scrutiny at the company’s annual meeting in Melbourne.

Ahead of the gathering of investors, which now includes Hong Kong billionaire Lawrence Ho with 10 per cent, if any need a recap on the myriad regulatory inquiries engulfing Crown’s Melbourne casino they should pick up a copy of the just-released annual report of the local gaming regulator.

The doco provides a handy ready reckoner to matters regulatory outstanding for the JA-led board and management team in Victoria alone.

Crown is dealing with a Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation that is crawling all over the company, principally on three fronts.

The first is a longstanding matter focusing on the circumstances leading up to the detention by local authorities of 19 Crown Melbourne staff in China in October 2016, which was a key driving factor in the decline in Packer’s mental health during that period.

The VCGLR investigation was launched in 2017 and was meant to be finished last year, but is still going with no end date in sight.

The regulator’s second formal inquiry relates to issues raised in extensive reporting by media outlets this year concerning Crown’s junket operators and money laundering. The NSW regulator has an investigation under way on this too.

The Catherine Myers-led VCGLR is also busy assessing Crown’s response to the regulator’s recommendations in its sixth review (one is done every five years) of the Melbourne casino’s licence and assessing if it is satisfied with Crown’s response to the recommendations.

And let’s not forget the NSW regulator is also assessing whether Ho, the son of controversial Chinese businessman Stanley Ho, can keep the Crown shares he’s already paid for (at $13 a share compared with the company’s close yesterday of $12.15) as well as fulfil the deal with Packer to buy the same again (but watch for a renegotiated price) to take his stake to 19.9 per cent for $1.76bn.

All of which sets the scene for an eventful AGM in Crown’s River Room, where Perth businessman and director John Poynton will face a shareholder vote for the first time, while overloaded director about town Helen Coonan, former AFL chief Andrew Demetriou and adman Harold Mitchell (who’s fighting James Shipton’s ASIC in the Federal Court over Mitchell’s time as a director of Tennis Australia) will all face re-election to the Crown board.

Confronted with all that, don’t expect Packer, despite owning 35 per cent of the gambling company, to turn up.

The man’s not a fool.

Can the Cup save Ten?

You have to spend money to make money.

That’s clearly the theory being applied by local TV boss Paul Anderson and his master Armando Nunez at US media giant parent CBS when it comes to the turnaround of third-by-a-mile Australian free-to-air broadcaster Network Ten.

Having snatched the broadcast rights to the Melbourne Cup carnival from Kerry Stokes’ Seven West and with the event’s Derby Day now less than a fortnight away, Anderson’s Ten is putting the finishing touches to its broadcast plans for the week-long festival of racing.

Margin Call hears Ten, which is paying about $20m a year to Amanda Elliott’s Victoria Racing Club for the right to show the race that stops a nation, will roll out a Flemington first this year.

Ten Network CEO Paul Anderson at their Pyrmont headquarters. Picture: Hollie Adams

As part of Ten’s deal it’s getting a fancy marquee in the prestigious Birdcage, a cost that in recent years Seven elected not to fork out for. It instead conducted live crosses with its talent from the now defunct Emirates trackside tent.

In contrast Ten will roll out the red carpet to Ten sales boss Rod Prosser’s advertising clients, pollies and its talent in a well-positioned Birdcage hospitality space, in which the technical types are also constructing a purpose=built studio. The plan is for Ten to broadcast their flagship programs from there over the high-profile week.

Chief content officer Beverley McGarvey’s Studio 10 talk show, the network’s evening current affairs program The Project and its east coast nightly news bulletins will all be beamed from the marquee facility, for which Anderson must be paying a bomb, based on talent costs alone.

Anderson will be on hand most days at the course to welcome guests and watch over his substantial investment, which it is hoped will drive lagging revenue over the life of the five-year, $100m deal. There’s also talk that Nunez and a few of his friends from the mothership will be in town for the fun.

Stott ready for launch

Details are emerging of high-profile Sydney stock picker Chris Stott’s plans for his new boutique 1851 Capital.

Chris Stott, former chief investment officer/portfolio manager for Wilson Asset Management.

Stott, a former chief investment officer at outspoken fundie Geoff Wilson’s Wilson Asset Management, has formed his own niche investment management outfit.

Margin Call hears it will launch a new unlisted wholesale vehicle focusing on the smaller end of the listed market early next year.

Recent weeks have seen Stott, who “retired” from Wilson at the end of last year, take up plush premises in Sydney’s well-positioned 1 Castlereagh Street, after previously nutting out the plans for his fledgling boutique business from his home in Roseville.

While Stott is all in on the unfolding enterprise on his own via his private Yorkport Pty Ltd vehicle, the expert stock picker has started building his team, with former WAM colleague Mary-Ann Baldock now on board as chief operations officer.

There will be more hires to come, plus details on the fund size Stott is targeting.