John Farnham’s manager David Wilson sues Royal Caribbean over loss of earnings

Matt Gilbertson’s legal woes since falling through a stage on a cruise ship continue. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

If an entertainer gets injured at work, can their agent sue for the loss of their cut of your earnings? That’s the issue being tested in the US courts by David Wilson’s Watercooler Talent.

Probably best known as John Farnham’s manager, Wilson also represents Adelaide cabaret performer Matt Gilbertson – whose alter ego, camp accordion player Hans, rose to fame after a strong run on America’s Got Talent in 2018, and has been a staple at festivals ever since.

Sadly, a booking as an entertainer on a tour of the Greek islands run by Atlantis Events on a Royal Caribbean Cruises liner went horrifically wrong for Gilbertson in 2022.

The stage Gilbertson was working on had three hydraulic lifts to move sections of the floor up and down. One section was down when it should have been up, and the performer fell more than three metres – suffering a badly broken foot, spinal damage, and a host of more minor injuries.

Matt Gilbertson’s legal woes since falling through a stage on a cruise ship continue. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

Gilbertson himself has been bogged down in a lengthy compensation battle in the US courts over his injuries, after launching legal action against Royal Caribbean and Atlantis two years ago.

Suffice to say, the cruise liner has fought him every step of the way. The accident wasn’t its fault, the company says in legal filings. And even if it was, damages are limited because it is subject to maritime law. Or the ticket Gilbertson accepted to take on the cruise also included a limitation on damages. Or he should just simply have taken more care. You get the gist.

As part of their defence, Royal Caribbean have even gone to the Canberra courts to try to get hold of the performer’s social security records and applied to the Victorian courts to subpoena Gilbertson’s earnings records from Watercooler.

Which, we’re guessing, has sufficiently irritated Wilson to go to the trouble of launching his own suit against both the cruise liner and promoter Atlantis, claiming their negligence has cost Watercooler its cut of the fees Gilbertson would have commanded except for his injury.

Not only did Gilbertson lose work in the immediate aftermath, the suit claims, but his recent return to the stage is on a “very restricted basis”, in both number and style of performance.

“Gilbertson’s performance is very physically demanding, and includes dancing and jumping and playing the piano accordion. His inability to perform all these activities during his show has resulted in a loss of audience attraction and income,” court documents say.

Seems fair enough – certainly a better look than trying to claim the talent agency’s cut of whatever the US courts eventually award Gilbertson himself, even if it does come with slightly higher legal bills.

Though, given the glacial pace that the entertainer’s own compensation suit is taking to work its way through the US legal system, we’re not betting on an outcome anytime soon.

In the meantime, Gilbertson is launching a regional tour this month, kicking off in Albury on July 25. Good luck to him.

‘Reputational consequences’

Venture capitalist Alan Jones doesn’t mind throwing down a bit of snark online (who doesn’t?) although some of his recent commentary has evidently been way too hot for the organisers of next month’s Startup/Angels Investor Conference. Jones, managing partner at M8 Ventures, has been dumped as a headline speaker for some of his sharper musings on Zionism and the war between Israel and Hamas.

M8 Ventures managing partners Emily Rich and Alan Jones

Of striking interest to event officials was a Facebook post from a few weeks ago in which Jones had a laugh at the expense of Druze being massacred in Syria, calling them “Drews”, which was odd, and joking about how the Israel Defence Forces had been providing them with assistance. “Been hearing a lot about Drew’s fighting the Bedouins in Syria. Lay off it mate,” he wrote, “the IDF’s got its hands full genociding The Palestinians (sic) right now.”

Officials were equally unimpressed with a tweet from Jones, posted last year, querying whether an attack on the office of Jewish Labor MP Josh Burns, in which devil horns were spray painted onto his face with the words “Zionism is Fascism”, counted as anti-Semitism or not.

Kooyong MP Monique Ryan came to her own conclusion, tweeting a picture of the damage and saying: “Painting devil horns on a Jewish MP is antisemitism”, an observation that comports with the historical record of evil Jew tropes – and Ryan herself isn’t even a great fan of Israel.

But Jones, not convinced, replied: “Isn’t it anti-Zionism? Wouldn’t anti-Semitism be spray-painting ‘Jews are Fascists’?” It wasn’t a debate that the people running Startup/Angels were willing to abide.

Jones responded late on Wednesday expressing serious regret over the Facebook post, calling it a “huge lapse of judgment” and apologising unreservedly to those “who felt hurt, offended, or targeted by my words”.

“I did not take the time to think through how my lame attempt at humour might have been received by those in my community. I have taken the time to reflect on the joke I made, and I now understand why it was not only in poor taste, it was deeply insensitive.”

No word back from Startup/Angels, but never mind. We’d already obtained correspondence confirming that they’d dumped Jones because his “views and actions” were out of step with the standards of “the start-up and investment community”. Plus, he posed a potential liability to the event’s list of corporate partners.

“We understand the significant reputational consequences that continued association with Mr. Jones could have had for both our brand and those of our esteemed partners, including United Airlines, Dell Technologies, Stripe, Deel, Antler, and UNSW Founders,” a spokeswoman said.

Family ties

Andrew Spira was the focal point of a column item we filed on Monday that mentioned not only his lending business, Skyecap, and his latest bid to raise $10m from investors, but also a profusion of criminal convictions that he’d racked up over the past 12 months, including several for fraud. And we mentioned his familial links to Ita Buttrose, the former ABC chair. Spira’s mother, Lizzie, is her niece.

And so it’s best that we round out some additional symmetry concerning kinship relations at Skyecap. For we neglected to mention that Spira’s co-founder in the business, Daniel Agius, also hails from colourful stock. His father Robert Agius is the Vanuatu-based tax accountant jailed in 2012 for conspiring to defraud the Commonwealth, having been ensnared by the Australian Federal Police and their infamous Project Wickenby investigation. He spent seven years in the can but was finally released in 2019.

Daniel Agius with partner Kwanchanok Mann.

Daniel, we hear, seeded much of the working capital to Skyecap to get it up and running last year. It’s probably why he was named chief operating officer of this fledgling enterprise, although how he finds time to run the shop between his many peripheral hustles is beyond our imagination. He’s already the managing director of a Vanuatu-based migration agency, a professional services firm and, unexpectedly, he’s also Vanuatu’s trade commissioner to Bangkok.

None of which is mentioned in the credit pack that was distributed to investors earlier this month by Sequoia Financial. We’ve already wondered why Sequoia would want their fingerprints anywhere near this, and they’ve already run a mile from the raise itself. Yes, nothing screams “trust me with your money” like a founder who’s pleaded guilty to a pile of fraud offences and a co-pilot (Agius) whose day job can best be described as “offshore tax accountant”.

But it’s obviously lucrative, this line of work. Agius’s partner Kwanchanok Mann has been sedulously documenting every first-class flight and three-star meal, uploading it all to social media, packing the grids with globs of caviar, vintage champagne, a dog named Birkin, and much reclining aboard the Emirates suites. Safe to say these are not people who turn right on planes.