Anthony Bell backs Adam Walters’ NewsCar app plan

Illustration: Rod Clement.

Fame-hungry accountant Anthony Bell’s unedifying AVO showdown with the mother of his children, Kelly Landry, has been accompanied by a curious new business interest, NewsCar.

The ambitious Bell (better known to many as Australia’s first “accountant to the stars”) is backing the fledgling news gathering business, which is being driven by Adam Walters (a former TV journalist better known to many as a star of Media Watch).

The now Byron Bay-based Walters has developed an app that will allow ride-share drivers to double as first responder cameramen, who can then sell their vision to hungry newsrooms.

“Hold the front page!” we’d joke, only that actually happened last week at The Australian Financial Review. What was that about?

The Financial Review gives Adam Walters’ new scheme the front page treatment.

Walters was a one-time adviser to former NSW premier Morris Iemma where he worked with John Choueifate, who is now the news director at Ten. That’s the network where Walters worked until mid-May last year, when Ten was forced to apologise on air for a Walters story about Charif Kazal’s ICAC troubles.

It wasn’t the TV journo’s first brush with infamy. Back in 2010 after he had moved from the NSW Premier’s office to Kerry Stokes’s Seven, Walters presided over an infamous story based on hidden camera footage of then roads minister David Campbell visiting a gay sex club. It is widely considered one of the grubbiest stories ever to air in Australia.

Walters has a two-thirds stake in the NewsCar enterprise. Falling in behind him is Bell, who has a 6 per cent stake. Key members of the accountant’s executive team at Bell Partners, including Brett Taggart and Harry Edwards, have about 6 per cent each.

Also backing the reporter’s latest venture are freelance cameramen Jason Webster and Ben Hanson, who each have 10 per cent.

Considering Walters’ highlights reel, the mind boggles at what stories this bunch will soon be pitching to newsrooms around the country.

A tawdry story

One tawdry story Adam Walters’ NewsCar team will no doubt be keeping well away from is Anthony Bell’s return to court on May 1 to fight Kelly Landry’s application to extend for 12 months the AVO she has taken out against him.

Anthony Bell hugs wife Kelly in happier times. Picture: Cameron Richardson

The five-day legal affair will reportedly include CCTV footage, along with 10 witnesses, to determine whether or not Bell dressed up as woman to take clandestine photos of Landry. Even by Sydney’s eastern suburbs standards, this one’s a shocker.

For now Bell has been ordered to keep away from the couple’s Watsons Bay five-bedroom-and-jetty waterfront home, which they bought in 2013 for $12.5 million with a mortgage from what was then Gail Kelly’s Westpac.

Two years later, a second mortgage was taken out on the home, a detail Landry’s lawyers should be acutely aware of as they negotiate the couple’s divorce settlement.

Also likely to be up for negotiation is the future of fund manager Perpetual’s sponsorship of Bell’s supermaxi, which won the most recent Sydney-Hobart yacht race days before the original AVO was sought.

Former ASIC chairman Tony D’Aloisio takes over as chair of Perpetual on May 31 from the outgoing Peter Scott.

Wonder if he thinks Bell’s boat has a place in the financial service firm’s future?

Getting of Winston

Anthony Bell’s mortgage banker Brian Hartzer has a star turn in The Deal magazine, which will be inserted in tomorrow’s copy of The Australian. Get your hot little hands on a copy.

There’s a great Q&A segment with the Westpac CEO. The “What books do you read?” section is terrific, as Hartzer is a rare banker who actually reads.

Group photo to mark Westpac's 200th anniversary; CEO Brian Hartzer with L to R..Judy Scott, former CEO Gail Kelly, Helen Lynch. Picture: John Feder.

And it underlines a passion in common between the Princeton history graduate and Labor’s shadow treasurer, Chris Bowen.

They are both Winston Churchill fanatics. Bowen made that abundantly clear in 2015 in a piece in this masthead on his “10 best Churchillian books”, written to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the cigar-chomping, champagne-swilling, bath enthusiast.

It’s a love Hartzer shares.

“I wrote my thesis at university on Winston Churchill so books about him are usually not far away,” he tells The Deal.

It makes for useful small talk for Bowen, who will quite possibly be Hartzer’s portfolio minister in the not too distant future — if the disgruntled fellow Winston lover Tony Abbott gets his way.

Fox’s 80 candles

After an unprecedented build-up, Lindsay Fox finally turned 80 yesterday — although the trucking billionaire’s birthday festivities are not done yet.

Lindsay Fox with some of his car collection in Melbourne.

On Friday, an entourage — including, we understand, a few billionaires — will gather for a whisky tasting at the Docklands shed that houses Fox’s classic car collection.

The birthday boy has just flown his private jet back from property billionaire Lang Walker’s recently opened Fijian Island resort Kokomo. That was a relatively intimate family affair for Fox, following the extravagant “Conception Party” he threw nine months ago on the Mediterranean with 450-odd guests, including iron ore and cattle billionaires Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest, and Fox’s billionaire bestie, Solomon Lew.

Also not done yet is the division of Fox and wife Paula’s $2.5 billion trucking, property and aviation empire.

Their three sons — Peter, Andrew and David — have been given shares in the group’s logistics, property and airport assets, while their daughters Katrina and Lisa have been given shares in the family’s philanthropic arm, the Fox Family Foundation. It’s not clear who has dibs on the car collection.

The succession plan has still not been formally signed off, although we’re told all should be in place well before Fox’s next birthday.

Ten headaches

You could forgive Ten boss Paul Anderson a touch of paranoia as he prepares to air the network’s numbers on April 27.

Ten Network CEO Paul Anderson. Picture: AAP.

Already Anderson has warned investors that tough conditions in the TV ad market will see Ten post an interim loss of $5m. In the past two financial years, Ten has written down a total of $386m of value from its TV licence, which was originally valued on its balance sheet at a whopping $1.08bn back when free-to-air broadcasting was lucrative.

According to Ten’s last accounts, that licence is now worth $346.5m — that’s almost double Ten’s market cap of $177m yesterday.

ASIC chief Greg Medcraft has come down heavily this season on the carrying value of assets.

The corporate cop encouraged Tim Worner’s Seven West Media to slash $75.5m from the value of Yahoo 7, while Hugh Marks’s Nine Entertainment was nudged to write down the value of goodwill by $260m.

Ten values its licences based on ad revenue, so whether another writedown is due will depend on the extent to which things have deteriorated in the first half.

Medcraft’s prying eyes are far from the only thing occupying Anderson and his chairman, David Gordon.

A $200m Commonwealth Bank debt facility, which in 2013 was guaranteed by James Packer, Lachlan Murdoch and Bruce Gordon, expires in December.

All of which should focus the mind of Communications Minister Mitch Fifield as he faces pressure from Anderson, Worner and Marks to lobby Scott Morrison to further cut their licence fees in his May budget.