Brian Hartzer’s eyes still on Westpac dividends

Westpac CEO Peter King. Picture: Nikki Short

Like self-funded retirees coast to coast, sacked Westpac boss Brian Hartzer will be watching for Westpac board updates with interest.

He is sitting on 30,545 fully paid Westpac shares that at last year’s 94c-a-share interim dividend raked in about $123,000 in spending money, handy possibly as he sits out the year at his Pittwater weekender at Elvina Bay on gardening leave.

While Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his Health Minister, Greg Hunt, were busy imploring Australians to stay home over the Easter break, the now John McFarlane-chaired Westpac board was busy meeting to sign off on a whopping $1bn-plus thump to interim earnings thanks to the unfolding Austrac money-laundering scandal.

New boss Peter King will unveil half-year earnings in less than three weeks, but before that his board will meet again to finalise impairment provisions for the six months to the end of March due to COVID-19 and the extent to which the dividend will be cut as a result.

After that, King will update the market again so that come May 4 there are no surprises.

On Tuesday King, who turned 50 earlier this month, was at Westpac HQ to marshall through phase one of the preparation for the bank’s poor profit.

That was as his risk execs moved on to stress-testing reduced dividend scenarios with the Wayne Byres-led banking regulator APRA, which has already warned that lenders may need to reduce interim dividends due to the havoc wreaked by the coronavirus.

For acting Westpac CFO Gary Thursby, who was COO until the executive chairs were reshuffled at the end of last year amid Hartzer’s exit, he’s now overseeing bank finances at the most challenging of times.

But like ScoMo and his Social Services Minister, Stuart Robert, Thursby has strong faith on his side. The 56-year-old is a director of the Australian arm of a religious missionary group, Operation Mobilisation, that seeks to spread the word of God far and wide.

Thursby is also a director of Anglican co-ed Barker College in Sydney, through which his three children have passed and where he also shares the council table with former Macquarie chairman Kevin McCann.

At the very least, Thursby is expected to be in the CFO hot seat until after results, and the “virtual” investor briefings.

Ban takes effect

ASIC’s decision to ban Simon Poidevin from providing financial services for five years has taken effect after the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) revoked its stay order.

The AAT’s revocation followed Poidevin withdrawing his application for review last month. It was 2017 when Poidevin, Bell Potter’s managing director of corporate broking, and trader Damien Rodr copped the prospect of the ban following an investigation into 2015 trading in shares of DirectMoney Limited. Poidevin took part in transactions carried out by Rodr that had or were likely to have the effect of creating or maintaining an artificial price for trading in DM1 shares, contrary to s1041A of the Corporations Act.

Last month Poidevin left Bell Potter to join Total Brain, a company that has produced what’s been described as the “Fitbit” for the brain. He’s now the president of the ASX-listed company for its Australia and New Zealand division.

Putting it on Plastiq

Shark Tank’s Andrew Banks’ black book of investor mates came in handy when launching his new fintech start-up Plastiq.

The shareholders of the Plastiq.it, billed as a new way of shopping with loyalty cards, read like a who’s who of Sydney and Melbourne’s entrepreneurial business elite.

The biggest name is Banks’ Point Piper pal Peter Ivany, the former chief executive of cinema giant Hoyts and Ivany Investment Group founder.

Ivany has taken 100,000 shares, as has another Point Piper local, John Marshall, the long-time investment group Marshall Investments chairman.

General Pants Group executive chairman and co-owner Phil Staub and wife Jackie Vidor have signed up. Ditto David Leeton, who is the chief financial officer at Victor Smorgon Group.

Art collector Danny Goldberg, merchant banker Stephen Chapman and wife Deanne, and veteran investor Phillip Cave, of Anchorage Capital Partners, have also invested.

Queensland-born serial entrepreneur Carl Hartmann, co-founder and chief executive of software company Temando, took 50,000 shares.

Co-founders David Anderson, who is also CEO, and Tricia Stevens, a Banks associate, have three million shares each, as does Banks.

Magpie’s medal

An 1896 premiership medal presented to Collingwood captain Bill Strickland has been listed for May 10 online auction by the family.

The 15-carat yellow gold, Maltese cross-shaped medal with magpie has an estimate of between $10,000 and $15,000 from Leski Auctions, some 125 years after the big game.

They’ll be hoping to match or better a 2016 sale when a similar medal, awarded to teammate Herman Dohrmann, sold for $15,000.

Strickland, the club’s first premiership skipper, had joined from Carlton, a recruiting coup that modern day club president Eddie McGuire is often keen to point out.

The 1896 season, the last for the then known Victorian Football Association, saw Collingwood beat South Melbourne by a goal, with Strickland playing in his 200th career game.

Eight of the competition’s teams left to establish the VFL the following year.

Strickland, who died in 1959 but was immortalised in a photograph holding the first Sherrin football, was inducted into the Collingwood Hall of Fame in 2017.

His family are also auctioning off his 18ct gold pocket watch, with his initials “WS” engraved on the front and “CF” on the reverse, to a design by the jewellers Kozminsky, who have served Melburnians since 1851.

Collingwood paid $27,500 earlier this year to support Dayne Beams’selfless gesture in auctioning his 2010 premiership medal to support bushfire relief efforts.

Small Taylor detail

Things are rarely straightforward when it comes to Angus Taylor.

Last year it was incorrect figures relating to Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s departmental travel.

There was his spat with feminist Naomi Wolf over claims he made about her in his maiden speech. And then controversy over his disclosures around a company called Jam Land, in which Taylor and his family had an interest.

So what are we to make of the former McKinsey management consultant-turned Member for Hume’s eye for detail? Here’s some more grist for the mill.

Two days before last Christmas, Taylor disclosed that his barrister wife Louise Clegg had made a real estate “investment” in Sydney. Then a couple of weeks ago Taylor disclosed that Clegg had become a director of a company called Chesterfields Flats Pty Ltd, whose activities were in “property”.

What that doesn’t tell you is that Chesterfield (there’s no ‘s’) Flats is the company that controls an 11-apartment building in Sydney’s inner-eastern suburb of Edgecliff (Member for Wentworth Dave Sharma’s territory), into which Clegg purchased last September.

From what we can glean, the lawyer bought the three-bedroom apartment for about $2.6m in an off-market deal to what at the time was described as a database buyer that piggybacked off the earlier sale of another apartment in the building. So it seems Clegg had been hunting for an inner-city pad for a while. Before the Taylors moved to Goulburn in Hume, they lived in Woollahra so know the area well.

But company records show that Clegg isn’t a director of Chesterfield as Taylor has told the parliament, rather just a shareholder. Former ABC chair Donald McDonald owns in the building, too.

We checked a few times with Taylor’s office about all this detail, but didn’t hear anything back. And there’s no trail to the apartment being rented out yet as an investment, so who knows what the power couple’s plans might be.