Brett Blundy’s high-rise Monaco life

Cartoon: Rod Clement

Billionaire Brett Blundy continues his peripatetic lifestyle with his home now one of Monaco’s newest luxury apartment blocks.

Blundy left Sydney’s shores some seven years ago with wife Vanessa Speer to live in Singapore, before making the move to the Bahamas a few years ago.

Now Margin Call has spotted official paperwork suggesting Blundy resides in a Monaco penthouse, marketed as “the ultimate palace”.

It isn’t known whether Blundy’s address update reflects a purchase or rental. Nor what he’s done with the Iain Halliday-styled home in the Ocean Club Estates gated community on Paradise Island.

The Blundys had been ­officially living in a condo on Singapore’s Sengkang Square.

The penthouse, which runs four levels, from 16 to 19, with 875sq m of internal space, and 1650sq m of space all up, includes a rooftop private infinity pool.

A recent Savills International report advises there is nowhere in Monaco more highly sought after than those within the glamorous Carré d’Or neighbourhood in Monte Carlo, home to the Hotel de Paris and the casino.

The building was designed by Monegasque architect Alexandre Giraldi, known in the principality for the Odeon Tower and the new Yacht Club de Monaco.

Blundy won’t be mooring his 74m Italian super yacht Cloud 9 at the yacht club, however. Last year Margin Call noted he had sold it, and we don’t know the name of any new purchase by Blundy, who ranked 54th richest on John Stensholt’s The List 2020 with a net worth of $1.86bn.

Monaco has not levied a personal income tax on its residents since 1869, although a person must live in the principality for six months and one day out of the year to be considered a resident.

Blundy left Sydney for Singapore in 2013, shortly after he’d agreed to a deal paying $33m for a luxury five-bedroom home in Rose Bay.

In 2016 Blundy listed the home with $45m hopes, with it selling for about $43m in 2018 to Lawrence Myers, board member of fund manager VGI Partners, and wife Sylvia.

It was the same year Blundy sold Bras N Things for about $500m to the David Bortolussi-led Hanes Australasia.

Blundy also sold Sweven, a Hawkesbury River retreat, in a ­billionaire trade. The $18.75m buyer was associated with Nanshan Group, which owns the Riverside Oaks Golf Resort next door.

Family patriarch Song Zuowen has retained his spot on the latest Forbes billionaires list, ranked last week at $US1.8bn ($2.8bn).

Blundy, who hails from a farm in country Victoria, has invested heavily in beef cattle farms.

Bestjet probe travels

Liquidation investigations continue into the 2018 collapse of online travel agency Bestjet Travel. The pursuit of documentation has gone offshore, with the Federal Court’s Justice John Reeves clearing the way to see what they can find in Singapore.

Bestjet and its subsidiaries, Wynyard Travel and Brooklyn Travel, went into voluntary administration in late 2018, leaving some 4000 Christmas passengers without tickets.

The court heard Bestjet’s online sales were about $70m a month on its collapse.

Founded in Brisbane by Rachel James in 2012, it took on the big boys Wotif.com, Webjet and Expedia in the competitive online travel market. Liquidators Nigel Markey and Bradley Hellen from Pilot Partners contend that her husband Michael James was a de facto director of Bestjet.

Just before the collapse James sold her shares to Robert McVicker Junior, with the ultimate destination of those monies one of the main issues being pursued by the liquidators who conducted a 12-day examination into the collapse last year.

Meanwhile, McVicker International is pursuing James for misleading and deceptive conduct.

Poidevin offload

Now that sharemarket veteran Simon Poidevin is officially a banned financial services representative, what of his standing in the Sydney business community?

This week the Administrative Appeals Tribunal dropped its stay order on Poidevin’s five-year ban after the former Bell Potter stockbroker last month withdrew his application for a review of the ban.

The humiliating sanction related to trading in shares in 2015 in a company called DirectMoney, which Bell Potter floated.

In a remarkable stroke of timing, Poidevin a few weeks ago quietly slipped away from Bell in favour of a gig drumming up interest in the local operations of brain training app company Smart Brain, which is listed on the ASX.

Bell in November had raised $14m for Total Brain via a placement, so imagine the prospect of Poidevin, with a five-year ban in limbo, then just a few months later going to work for the company as well.

How cosy is that?

Yesterday Margin Call got onto Total Brain non-exec director Matt Morgan, who told us it was full steam ahead for the loss-making tech’s new hire Poidevin, regardless of his professional ban.

Now that Philip King’s Regal Funds Management (which was raided by the Australian Federal Police last November as part of an unrelated ASIC investigation) and billionaire Kerr Neilson’s Platinum Asset Management are on Total Brain’s register, there will be plenty of investor relations for Poidevin to undertake.

Less clear, however, is the 61-year-old former Australian Rugby Union captain’s other roles about town, that previously befit his status as Bell Potter’s connected and high-profile head of corporate broking.

Poidevin, who lives across from the ocean at Coogee (in a home that is still mortgaged to Matt Comyn’s Commonwealth Bank), is a director of the ANZ chair David Gonski-led board of the University of NSW Foundation.

We asked company secretary Leah Lambert on Wednesday if Poidevin’s ban would affect his slot on the heavy-hitting board.

Lambert told us the matter of Poidevin remaining on the foundation board “has not been discussed”, but added that talks would occur “in due course”.

Time will tell.

Quick sale for Roos

Former AFL coach Paul Roos and wife Tami have secured the snappy sale of their contemporary Brighton home. They had $5.5m-$6m price hopes for the four-bedroom residence, bought in 2016 when the couple paid $3.85m to former Fitzroy and St Kilda player Allan Sinclair, whose son Callum plays for Sydney.

Its realestate.com.au listing of just four days attracted more than 4500 views.

Following coaching stints at the Swans and Melbourne, Roos joined the media as a Fox Footy analyst. There’s a framed Swans jumper in the TV room at the home listed through Marshall White agent Matt Pillios, who reportedly has become the go-to agent for footballers selling, including Alex Rance.

Meanwhile cricket legend Shane Warne has not yet jagged a buyer for his home just minutes from Roos’s, which comes with $6.8m-$7.4m hopes.

Success story

There is life after white-collar crime.

Just ask one-time insider trader John Hartman, one half of the dynamic share-trading duo that was completed by Sydney PR maven Roxy Jacenko’s flashy husband Oliver Curtis. Hartman, in his previous life as an equities trader, and Curtis, a junior investment banker, were one-time besties who have both spent time behind bars for a share-trading scheme that unfolded in 2007.

But that’s where their stories diverge.

Hartman pleaded guilty to insider trading while Curtis fought the whole way. Hartman was out of jail by the time Curtis went on trial in the NSW Supreme Court in 2016 and was ultimately found guilty and sent to spend time at her majesty’s pleasure at Cooma Correctional Centre.

Hartman’s contrition saw him offered a second chance by billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest.

The insider trader moved to Perth to work for the West Australian businessman’s Minderoo investment company, where he has stayed since 2012 and remained out of the limelight.

Latest from the west is that Hartman has joined the board of the Forrest and tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes-backed ambitious $20bn Sun Cable, which proposes to build a mammoth solar project in central Australia combined with battery storage, which are then connected to Singapore via an undersea cable.

That’s in addition to Hartman’s roles on the boards of a range of Minderoo’s other investments, making the now almost 35-year-old Hartman quite the story of success.

Meanwhile Curtis, the son of wealthy businessman and former Lynas chair Nick Curtis, is out of jail and working for wife Jacenko in her promotions company.