Brett Blundy struggles to sell property

Cartoon: Peter Nicholson.

Let’s hope billionaire Brett Blundy has more luck selling his retail real estate roll-up than he’s had unloading his Hawkesbury holiday shack.

After cashing in retail plays Adairs and Lovisa, BB has been busy applying spit-and-polish to his homemaker centre landlord BBRC Property, renaming it Aventus Property Group, and is looking for between $200m and $300m from investors.

In what looks like a bit of a finishing touch, last week Blundy and Aventus CEO Darren Holland set up a management company to run the business.

But there are still some details to take care of, like getting Aventus chairman Bruce Carter signed up with ASIC as an actual director, which has yet to happen even though he’s been with the property outfit for yonks.

Aventus shares its name with a macho men’s cologne that “honours traits of virility, power, strength and vision, inspired by Napoleon, the man who crowned himself emperor of France and all Europe”.

While syndicate investors don’t seem to mind high management, transaction and debt procurement fees, instos won’t stand for it. Nor will they accept poison-pill provisions that make it hard to sack a manager.

No doubt Blundy has learned from IPO failures like last year’s $300m Quattro Income, which foundered on fee fears.

And will he hold any of his portfolio back from the IPO?

Meanwhile, Blundy, who these days gives his address as one of the $6000-a-night manors at the luxury Capella resort in Singapore, has been trying to flog his rural spread “Sweven” since mid-March.

It’s the second time Blundy has tried to sell the pile, and while there’ve been plenty of tyre kickers and two interested parties, there’s no deal yet.

The lunch bunch

While Penny Wong and Cory Bernadi were duking it out in Canberra over same sex marriage, but standing together on bestiality, back in Harbour City the real power was lunching at Japanese nosh shop Azuma.

Former Telstra and Allco chair Bob Mansfield might have been pondering over his miso soup whether he should stick his head up for one of the free seats on the ABC board.

A quiet word with banker and ABC director Simon Mordant might have helped, if only he’d been able to tear himself from Credit Suisse heavies John Knox and John O’Sullivan.

Elsewhere it was a family affair, albeit at some distance. At one table was One.Tel founder Jodee Rich, while his in-law, investment banker turned company director Catherine Brenner, sat elsewhere.

Brenner, who is married to the brother of Rich’s wife Maxine, is on the board at AMP, Boral and Coca Cola Amatil. Maxine, a lawyer who supported her husband throughout the One.Tel collapse, is a director of Origin, Qantas and Orica.

Off target

Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop is against them, as is Minister Assisting him for Women Michaelia Cash, while Federal Member for Murray Sharman Stone is all for them.

But at Margin Call we don’t need them — quotas towards gender equality, that is.

Soon-to-exit ANZ boss Mike Smith, whose latest white paper hones in on the issue of gender equity at the bank, has a stated ambition for a 50-50 split in all talent and leadership programs at the bank.

But the ANZ board, led by chair David (Who Gives A) Gonski, comprises eight heavy hitting directors, including two women — Ilana Atlas and Paula Dwyer, or just 25 per cent.

That’s somewhat shy of the bank’s own target, as well as the less ambitious target championed by the recently launched 30 Per Cent Club. The stats were better before Alison Watkins left to run Coke.

But back to quotas. Dwyer has publicly said she’s not in favour of them.

“I don’t think you can have a process to build leaders,” she told this newspaper a while back.

Gough farewelled

Australia’s business elite is expected to gather in Melbourne tomorrow morning to farewell corporate titan John Gough, who passed away on the weekend aged in his late 80s.

Gough will be remembered as chair of the ANZ, whose boss Mike Smith will be amid bank executives at a memorial at St John’s Anglican Church, Toorak.

Gough was a director at BHP for 14 years as well as holding a seat on the board of CSR. Before that he ran Pacific Dunlop whose interests included tyre and food manufacturing, cables, condoms and car batteries.

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