Bill Gates takes trip to cattle country

Bill Gates, right, and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett.

Burger-loving billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has ­famously followed a data-led path from vegetarian back to omnivore in the past year.

And now we wonder if the world’s richest man has taken a liking to the technology of our oldest beef producer.

We can reveal that after the Microsoft founder dined in Sydney last week with some of Australia’s top billionaires — namely mining-turned-agribusiness mag­nates Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest and packaging brothers-in-law Anthony Pratt and Raphael Geminder — he ventured north to Queensland to visit Wylarah Station, 450km west of Brisbane.

The Gates convoy jetted into Surat, the nearest service town, and then ventured by road to the Australian Agricultural Company-owned property.

There he apparently met with some of the group’s management and a consultant to the company, Paul Wood, who these days is at Griffith Uni­versity but was once the CEO of the Australia Abattoirs Group.

What this secret rendezvous was all about is a matter of ­conjecture.

But don’t be surprised if there is some announcement in the next month or two about the $US44 billion ($59bn) Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnering with AACo to use the Australian firm’s genetics technology in Africa.

Gates trumpeted last year that “innovation will improve our ability to produce meat’’.

Whatever was agreed, we can be sure that with Gina fresh from her deal to buy the Kidman cattle company and Twiggy now with WA beef producer Harvey Beef in his stable, meat was surely on the conversation menu at Gates’s billionaires Sydney dinner — which, we understand, took place in Pratt’s Circular Quay apartment.

Alexiou settles

Sacked ANZ trading executive Etienne Alexiou is bouncing back from his bruising battle with four pillar CEO Shayne ­Elliott and the full force of the bank’s legal might.

Sacked ANZ trading executive Etienne Alexiou. Photo: Nine News.

Alexiou is finally poised to settle on the $7.55 million sale of his Wunulla Road, Point Piper mansion in Sydney, funds that will support the next phase of his career in financial markets.

Etienne Alexiou's Point Piper residence.

It was a quick real estate turnaround for Alexiou and wife Berry, the daughter of former Bell Financial director and advertising industry exec Malcolm Spry.

The couple bought the house for $7.2m in late 2014 from the Valmorbida family, who built their wealth on Lavazza coffee.

But it’s been a year-long settlement, which is now poised to expire, with the mysterious new owners having also just lodged plans for a $4.7m new build on the site that will take their total investment to more than $12m.

In the interim, it looks like the Alexious have been renting out the prestige home for $3500 a week while they live at the Woollahra home they bought for $2.92m in 2006.

Planning approval isn’t believed to be a condition of the Point Piper sale, but the Alexious will be hoping there is no spanner in the works and that their cheque is in the mail.

Alexiou flipped the property in late 2015, ahead of his ambitious $30m unfair dismissal lawsuit against ANZ, which sacked him in late 2015 for “serious breaches” of the bank’s “code of conduct” (such as writing lewd things on Bloomberg chat).

In his unfair dismissal case Alexiou — formerly of Barclays Bank — claimed ANZ had a wild culture, particularly on the global markets desk. His statement of claim told of company-endorsed strip club sessions and cocaine-laced birthday cakes.

Eventually, Alexiou dropped his well-advanced suit, saying he needed to protect his family.

Virtuous venture

Once Etienne Alexiou’s mortgage over the Point Piper home is paid off to (you guessed it) ANZ, any leftover will ease the mind ahead of the launch of the trader’s new business venture, Belay Capital.

He’s joined forces with banker Andrew Kloster, most recently from mid-tier boutique Miles Advisory Partners, to establish their own show.

It looks like the pair are heading into the lucrative world of funds management, with ambitious plans to establish an Australian-based global macro fund, to be known as the Virtuous Portfolio Fund.

No irony there.

Etienne Alexiou and Andrew Kloster are heading into funds management.

ASA’s insider coup

They are a serial irritant for boards at annual meetings, and it now looks like the Australian Shareholders’ Association has turned bounty hunter on corporate malfeasance.

ASA spokesman Stephen Mayne.

The voice of retail shareholders has just scored its biggest ever windfall with a $104,300 payment from Marcelino Fernandez Verdes’s Hochtief over insider trading.

The Europeans have just lost a Federal Court case brought by Greg Medcraft’s corporate cops over insider trading in shares of Leighton Holdings during the 2014 takeover battle.

Hochtief already controlled Leighton, was buying shares on-market and failed to put a halt to things when it discovered a price spike-inducing 30 per cent rise in annual net profit.

It seems the ASA — where spokesman Stephen Mayne has resumed duties after failing to win re-election to Melbourne City Council — tipped the ASX to this failing and is getting a bit over a quarter of the $400,000 penalty awarded by judge Michael Wigney for its trouble. Indigenous education group First Nations Foundation gets an equal amount for its My Moola adult financial literacy program.

Corporate Australia will no doubt be delighted the ASA — which is on the hunt for a new CEO — has agreed to spend the money on education and monitoring.

New gig for Conroy

There had been speculation immediately after his shock departure from the Senate that former Labor powerbroker Stephen Conroy would end up working for his alpine buddy, Seven billionaire Kerry Stokes.

Former Labor powerbroker Stephen Conroy. Picture: Glenn Ferguson.

As it’s turned out, Conroy’s post-political gig as the CEO of the new online bookmaker lobby Responsible Wagering Australia puts him, one step removed, on the payroll of another billionaire from his communications portfolio days: James Packer.

Before he sold his final 25 per cent stake in October 2008 at the end of Conroy’s first year as a minister in the Rudd government, Packer owned Channel Nine.

It wasn’t just the communications portfolio that brought Conroy and Packer together. The pair go back almost 20 years to when Conroy was just a 30-something “factional Dalek” in the Senate.

Take a peek under the fledgling entity’s corporate bonnet and you’ll see that association continues.

As declared in documents filed with ASIC, Responsible Wagering Australia is based in Melbourne at 120 Collins Street in the offices of CrownBet. That’s the online betting business run by Matt Tripp that is 67 per cent-owned by Packer’s listed gaming empire, Crown.

And the new lobbying outfit was set up in August — a month after an election that delivered a dealmaking Senate crossbench position to anti-gambling senator Nick Xenophon — by CrownBet’s head of legal and corporate affairs at CrownBet, Andrew Menz.

It remains unclear who chair Tassie Liberal Richard Colbeck’s fellow directors will be, how the entity will be funded and where Conroy and staff will be based in the long term.

And for now industry recalcitrants Ladbrokes and the Tom Waterhouse-led William Hill, who withdrew earlier this year from the previous representative body, remain outside the tent.

Meanwhile, Conroy has done some corporate incarnation of his own. In September he set up his own Chellwood Advisory, with him as director, and he and his Victorian Funds Management Corporation board member wife Paula Benson as shareholders.