Canva Foundation donates $52m to charity; Storm in a port as Gupta fights for control

Canva co-founders Cliff Obrecht, Melanie Perkins and Cameron Adams.

Good to see the endless speculation around the float of Canva hasn’t slowed the generous ­charity spending of its trio of billionaire founders. New documents show their foundation topped $52m in making donations this year.

The Canva Foundation, established by technology entrepreneurs Melanie Perkins and husband Cliff Obrecht, has rapidly emerged as one of Australia’s biggest charitable givers – probably topped only by Andrew and Nicola Forrest’s Minderoo for annual donations.

And, rather than tip bulk cash into a fund and have it sit around waiting for a good cause, the Canva Foundation appears to have developed a cash-in, cash-out mentality to do the most good.

The foundation took in $46.4m in 2024, its latest accounts show, and shipped out $52.8m for the year. That’s a fair whack bigger than the $31.6m donated in the 18 months to the end of 2023.

Cliff and Melanie have come a long way from the days when they worked from her mum’s living room.

As in previous years, Canva’s biggest recipient of help was Give­Directly, a non-profit organisation focused on helping people living in extreme poverty through unconditional cash transfers.

Cash matters, and Canva says it helped out in poverty-stricken Malawi by handing over money to all of the 85,000 adult residents of the Malawian district of Khongoni, as part of the $39m spent in the GiveDirectly program.

On top of that, Canva broadened its charitable efforts through an $11m gift to the Prevail Fund, which helps children in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia with foundational literacy and numeracy.

It’s a big total to be donating, particularly on such a quick turnaround. And, even more ­impressive is the fact that the charity also manages to keep its overheads down. Of its total $53.4m in spending, only $565,433 went on expenses – of which $523,000 went on the staff who keep the donations moving.

Well done to all.

Gupta’s fight over port

Now, to billionaires of a different variety.

Sanjeev Gupta’s messy exit from the Whyalla steelworks in South Australia continues apace. Having been stripped of control of the steelworks by legislation brought on by South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, the major battleground these days surrounds the control over the port on the Upper Spencer Gulf.

Why does that matter? Well, the ageing steelworks isn’t worth anything except the $2.4bn on offer in state and federal government assistance to keep it alive.

The iron ore mines that feed the Whyalla mills are still a valuable operation, however.

But, as they say in the mining game, if you don’t have a path to market – port infrastructure, in particular – what you have isn’t iron ore, it’s just dirt.

The South Australian government passed a separate set of laws trying to return control of the port to Whyalla administrator KordaMentha, which has previously ­argued a 99-year lease to Gupta’s Whyalla Ports either doesn’t exist, or can’t be enforced.

That’s still a contested issue. And now Whyalla Ports is in administration; Gupta called in McGrathNicol to the company on June 6, which was, curiously enough, only a day after port operator Qube lodged winding-up ­notices against the company over $7.5m in unpaid bills.

As we said, at the heart of the contest is whether Whyalla Ports actually owns anything at all. KordaMentha’s lawyers have previously argued that the company did effectively nothing to contribute to running the port, never made any lease payments, and didn’t employ any workers.

So much so that KordaMentha’s chief legal operative on the matter, Leon Zwier, went to court a week ago to argue that Whyalla Port’s push to retain control of the operation was little more than greenmail, designed to extract cash concessions from the steelwork’s administrators.

Gupta’s GFG disagrees.

And, sure enough, the first round of public documents filed by Whyalla Ports directors with its own administrator include clear claims to all the equipment and buildings on the site, with $84m in inter-company loans to OneSteel Manufacturing Finance.

But oddly enough, McGrathNicol administrator Robert Kirman said in his own ­assessment of Whyalla Ports’ ­assets and debts that he was being forced to rely on the director ­assessments, because he had “not obtained Whyalla Ports’ full ­financial records, which are consolidated with the financial records of a wider group of ­entities”.

Pretty much the same complaint being made by Korda­Mentha.

The other interested onlooker is ASX-listed NRW Holdings, which accepted security over the Whyalla Port assets last year over $113m in debts built up to the mining contractor for running the iron ore mines.

So important is the matter to NRW that it sent its own lawyers to court last week to support GFG’s arguments for retaining an interest in the port – a bizarre situation given how comprehensively Gupta’s empire has stiffed the mining contractor.

The entire mess is likely to stay before the courts for some time, but almost nobody will be a winner while it does.