Brett Blundy’s Honey Birdette booty anything but skimpy

Honey Birdette founder Eloise Monaghan, third from the right, at the Honey Birdette grand opening at the Fashion Show Mall in Las Vegas in May. Picture: Getty Images

There’s nothing skimpy about the $US333m ($443m) price tag that Australian (in self-imposed exile) retail billionaire Brett Blundy has managed to extract from the sale of his next-level lingerie and sex toy chain Honey Birdette.

The company behind Playboy magazine, PLBY Group, which was founded by the late Hugh Hefner, will pay Blundy’s private Monaco-based BBRC International a combination of cash and shares in the Los Angeles-listed company.

But the 61-year-old Melbourne-born businessman won’t be the only one to pocket millions from the deal.

Blundy, who is estimated in The List to be worth $1.94bn and whose interests include listed jeweller Lovisa, homewares retailer Adairs and clothing and footwear roll-up Accent Group, controls just under 62 per cent of Honey Birdette, which is worth about $275m at the group’s sale price to Playboy Enterprises.

So who cashes in on the rest?

Blundy’s long-term business associate Ray Itaoui, who owns Sanity music stores that he purchased from Blundy’s BB Retail in 2009, has his fingers in the Honey Birdette pie with a stake of just over 21 per cent.

At the deal price that’s going to net Itaoui a cool $93m.

Illustration: Rod Clement.

Indeed, Blundy can’t take all the credit for the female-friendly lingerie retail concept.

Honey Birdette was first founded by Sydneysiders Eloise Monaghan and her then girlfriend Janelle Barboza in 2006, with Blundy buying into the business in 2011.

Things got a bit messy after that and Barboza sold her stake in 2014, only to later sue Blundy over the transaction. The Supreme Court battle ended in April this year in what was a win for the billionaire.

But Monaghan, 45, who lives in a modern penthouse apartment in Sydney’s Vaucluse, has stuck around. She remains managing director and significant shareholder of the successful ­retailer with a 15 per cent stake that is held via her Brandy Fox Pty Ltd.

That’s a $66.5m payday after 15 years. Happy days.

The rest, as they say, is a family affair, with Blundy’s Point Lonsdale-based sister Tracey Blundy in with a stake that’s just been crystallised at $7.5m and what we suspect is Blundy’s mum Candy, a now retired head of special projects at Blundy’s Bras N Things, with shares worth just under $2m.

That’s what you might call spreading the love.

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New Packer glimpse

As if three royal commissions in less than a year isn’t quite enough, there will be yet another chance to look inside the jet-set world and turbulent mind of Crown Resorts billionaire shareholder James Packer.

This time it will be courtesy of the Victorian WorkCover Authority, which has filed a statement of claim in the Victorian Supreme Court seeking compensation for a casino security guard allegedly sacked for confronting 36 per cent Crown shareholder Packer at his Melbourne casino.

Julie Bishop, her partner David Panton and James Packer arrive at Crown Casino’s New Year’s Eve Party at Crown Palladium in 2015. Picture: Getty Images

Security guard Iskandar Chaban, who has a PhD in philosophy from Melbourne University, was sacked from Crown after approaching an allegedly drunk Packer, and wants $326,834 for injuries he subsequently sustained on his way home.

It all happened at about lunchtime on New Year’s Day 2016, which was the day after Packer’s then fiance pop songbird Mariah Carey had performed a special concert at Crown on the night before.

Also there for the night were then foreign minister Julie Bishop and her partner David Panton, who were special guests of Packer’s to watch Carey perform, along with family matriarch Ros.

Alongside Packer at the time of the alleged incident with the security guard was his former personal assistant when in Melbourne, Crown exec Ishan Ratnam, who of course gave evidence to Patricia Bergin’s Crowninquiry in NSW and not uncoincidentally no longer works at the gambling house.

The alleged confrontation with the security guard is not the first time Packer has found himself at the centre of a controversy.

Unforgettable was Packer’s Bondi street fight with former bestie and one-time Nine chief David Gyngell in 2014, which was splashed all over local newspapers, not to mention Packer’s threats via email to Melbourne private equiteer Ben Gray that emerged in evidence during the Bergin inquiry.

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AGL hindsight

As AGL plots its clean/coal demerger, its shares fall further and former CEO Brett Redman whittles away his notice period, we can almost hear the “I told you so” cry rippling from across the Pacific from Redman’s predecessor, the controversial Andy Vesey.

Former AGL chief executive Brett Redman. Picture: Britta Campion

Recall it was Vesey who was shown the exit in 2018 after rubbing up against the more conservative policies of the then Malcolm Turnbull-led coalition government, including his refusal to sell or extend the life of the Liddell coal-fired plant.

Oh how things have changed.

While Vesey has since moved back to his native US, where he was for a short time the chief of Californian mega-utility PG&E, and largely severed ties with Australia, one thing that hasn’t changed is his staunch campaign for clean energy.

However, a recent episode of the now self-proclaimed “entrepreneur, investor and award-winning energy executive’s” new podcast does allude to prior frosty relations with some “wooden-headed” governments and coming up against a resistance to change at the board level.

But there was one line in particular that seems particularly apt given the changes afoot at AGL: “We design organisations and they evolve very slowly and we tend to have boards that are extremely senior, they tend to have long years of experience, the question is can you take these folks, provide them with a new view of the world and expect them to make a different decisions?”

Such is the predicament for AGL, whose chair and current interim chief Graeme Hunt is slated to lead the new “bad AGL” arm under the Accel Energy moniker and new chairman Peter Botten.

Meanwhile AGL director Patricia McKenzie, also formerly of APA, takes chairmanship at the clean-energy arm to be known as AGL Australia, as led by current chief customer officer Christine Corbett.

As for Redman, he continues to act as an adviser to the company as he counts down to the end of his notice period in mid-October.

No word yet on his next moves, though might we suggest that a podcast with the two hurriedly departed chiefs would make for rather intriguing listening.

Brett Blundy

James Packer

Brett Redman