Bain Capital is still locked in its hushed-up talks to sell 20 per cent of Virgin Australia to Qatar Airways, a deal apparently so close to being finalised that it’s only a few weeks away. Yes, people were saying that two months ago, but this time it’s supposed to be true.
Ahead of that, Margin Call has confirmed that Bain just ticked off a 33c dividend that will spill out from its own purse (it owns 93 per cent of the business) to outgoing CEO Jayne Hrdlicka and the rest of the executives in the C-suites, to the folk in the airline’s upper middle management, including a swag of GMs who took possession of 20,000 shares each – but only if they joined Virgin before last year, when share buy-in schemes began tapering off for fresh hires.
How does 33.3c compare to the previous distribution? It’s a total return of between $200m-$300m, quite a drop from the $731m paid out last year, and which Bain pretty much used at the time to square its own ledger and pay itself back for all the money it plunged on the business in 2020 (to buy the airline out of administration).
Some might wonder if a dividend payment now, on the very eve of the Qatar manoeuvrings, might be some kind of move to clear excess cash off the books as the deal’s final Ts get crossed and Is get dotted. On timing alone, it’s serendipitous enough.
Not that the Qatari government, which wholly owns its flying oryx, deals in cold, hard cash all that much anymore. Or so one assumes from the many gold bars that surfaced during the recent criminal trial of US Senator Bob Menendez.
Dubbed by prosecutors as a “Senator on the take”, Menendez, supposedly an influential figure in Washington, was found guilty of acting as an agent of the Qatari and Egyptian governments. His payment for services? Dozens of gold bars, plus cash and a Mercedes-Benz, which was given to his wife.
Presumably Mike Murphy, Bain’s lead in Australia, has enough coin to buy his own Benz. But who’d say no to a bit of bullion?
Jobs for the pollies
Cast your mind back roughly 18 months to when Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher issued her sternest commitment to restoring the integrity of public sector board appointments, exploited as they had been, she said, by previous Liberal governments.
Gallagher was particularly mocking of the Morrison-era cabinet for its egregious elevation of party hacks and silly stooges, saying they’d been installed as a result of political nous over downright merit.
“Being on a government board should be about what you know, not who you know,” Gallagher said at the time, announcing that former Public Service Commissioner Lynelle Briggs would conduct an integrity review of board appointments.
“This review is all about putting an end to the jobs for mates culture. In line with the government’s commitment to transparency, a report will be published after the review is finalised in mid-2023.”
Commitment to transparency, eh? Remember those words, because here we are, more than one year after that self-imposed deadline, and Briggs’ report is harder to find than tickets to a Pearl Jam concert. It’s nowhere to be sighted, and that’s because Gallagher herself won’t release it. Her office confirmed it was in the government’s possession but said it wasn’t ready for general viewing. We can only wonder what’s in it?
Delays of this magnitude really do have a whiff of piss-taking about them, even more so when we learned on Friday that former Queensland Labor premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, who resigned from politics last year, was the government’s next appointee to the board of Australia Post.
And who’s Palaszczuk replacing? Tony Nutt, a former Liberal Party federal director. They’re swapping one political appointment for another, and presumably this would have been much harder to achieve had Briggs’ review been distributed already.
Not that Palaszczuk is the only recent appointment of this kind. Barrie Cassidy, a former press secretary to Bob Hawke, was named chair of the Old Parliament House board last year. And who could forget former NSW Liberal politician Matt Kean, now the chair of the Climate Change Authority.
Some might say a Labor government appointing a Lib isn’t quite the same as shunting one of its own party elders into a coveted directorship. But as Barnaby Joyce memorably said, Kean was always a Liberal in name only. “He should have joined the Labor Party in the start when he left school and signed up. That’s his natural home.”
A bigger slice
And then there’s a bold move from Domino’s Pizza to appoint the CEO’s sister, Kerri Hayman, to lead the Australia New Zealand arm of the embattled brand. Not because of nepotism (Hayman has been in the business for 36 years, earned her stripes in executive roles, worked on three continents, etc) but mainly because, like her brother, Don Meij, she’s not averse to tacky displays of extreme wealth.
Especially at a time when Domino’s share price has tanked to its lowest level in a decade ($33.50 as of Friday’s close). The company’s moving to close 10 per cent of its stores in the laggard markets of Japan and France, and it’s also conducting a rethink of its long-term growth target to reach 7100 stores internationally by 2033.
In Australia, Domino’s produced a mixed result. On the one hand, the group’s EBIT numbers increased by nearly 30 per cent during the first half of FY24. And yet franchise owners themselves have taken a massive hit, their average operating profits dropping from $138,000 in 2021 to $94,600 in 2024, a 31 per cent fall. Certainly not enough for their managers to buy the sort of sleek McLaren 720s Spider spotted on occasion in a reserved Domino’s parking spot in Queensland, its number plate PZZAGRL.
Who exactly owns this real life Lightning McQueen? Hayman confirmed to Margin Call that, yes, it was her car, and actually she was quite proud of it.
“During my time as a franchise partner in the United States, I built a thriving 14-store business over nine years. I sold them down at a record multiple in order to return home to do my dream job in Australia in October 2023, and used the profits of the sale to buy a new car and a home for my family.”
No doubt franchise operators all over the country will be dreaming of the same once they hear about this pimped-up vehicle. It might just take them another couple of decades to buy a similar class of beast given their yearly earnings keep dropping. Hayman’s McLaren starts around the half-million dollar mark.
Twist in move to trademark the ‘river’
It was only a matter of time before someone tried putting a trademark on the pro-Palestine rallying cry, but the obvious candidates have been beaten to the punch.
Game, set and much posturing at opening salvo
Let’s call it the first — and ultimate — status update of the corporate season. School assembly for the CEOs. The gathering of big-shots and silverbacks. The Australian Open tennis finals.