Cash trumps transfer for CBA duo’s election bet; Don’t cry over spilt milk, just pour some more
Word is bond, right? Commonwealth Bank group executive Mike Vacy-Lyle took a $1000 bet on Kamala Harris winning the US election earlier this month, entering into that wager with Angus Sullivan, CBA’s retail banking boss.
These two big dogs are pretty chummy. Earlier this year Vacy-Lyle, head of the business bank, described Sullivan as one of “the best bankers I have ever worked with”, which is swell considering both are in line for CEO succession planning when the big cheese, Matt Comyn, finally vacates the spot. He’s held it since 2018.
Comyn, it turns out, also thought Donald Trump would probably win the election, but judging by the remarks he made two days after the results were counted – in which he said Trump’s proposed import tariffs were “inflationary” and likely to keep interest rates “higher for longer” – we harbour doubts that an orange man in the White House is what he actually hoped for.
Anyway, it took a few weeks but Vacy-Lyle recently ponied up the grand that he owed Sullivan, paying him not with a simple PayID transfer but rather playfully with cold, hard currency, and he insisted on handing it to Sullivan in $50 bills.
Why? To force Sullivan into cashing the funds at an actual branch, which is ironic because CBA has closed – sorry, “optimised” – more than 250 sites over the past five years and shut down more than 50 per cent of its ATMs. Who knew the old marketing slogan (“Which Bank?”) was actually a prophecy all along.
And Comyn, as you may know, isn’t exactly hot on cash. He thinks it’s expensive to stock, to transport around the country, and earlier this year he even suggested a prohibition on making cash payments above $500 to help curb the tax-dodging ills of the shadow economy.
Which makes us wonder: what does he really think of his two golden-haired reports making that bet on Trump? YB
Spilt milk
If at first you don’t succeed, find another company shell and give it a crack. That certainly seems to be the theory of former A2 Milk executive Peter Nathan, who is getting the band back together over at ASX-listed tiddler Australian Dairy Nutritionals.
Credited with much of A2’s success in expanding its market into China in the boom years for infant formula, after getting the hang of the country’s notorious daigou marketing channels ahead of his rivals, Nathan left something of a sour taste with retail shareholders on his departure.
He quit the New Zealand company in 2021 after successive downgrades, and after flogging a substantial number of shares at the top of the market.
Nathan was last seen on the losing side of a board spill at Bubs amid a bitter falling out between ousted chief executive Kristy Carr and chair Katrina Rathie. Carr copped the blame for a failed China-focused marketing strategy and tried to roll the board, picking Nathan to lead Bubs in her stead.
That effort fell well short of the shareholder votes needed, and the rebels slunk off into the distance.
But failure at Bubs hasn’t dimmed Nathan’s ambition to replicate the success of A2, where he served as the milk-seller’s Asia-Pacific boss.
After taking over as executive chairman at ADN in June, where former A2 boss Geoff Babidge is also a shareholder, Nathan’s first move was to install his one-time marketing director at A2, Mahi Sundaranathan, as chief executive.
And who joined the ADN board in October? China’s daigou king Andy Zhang, who claims credit for the success of A2 products in the country before the pandemic, importing cargo loads of baby formula for sale to Chinese consumers.
Zhang, of course, also played a major role in the Bubs stoush. He stopped buying A2 baby formula when Nathan left the company, shifting his attention to Bubs. But that relationship also soured when Carr was ousted, and the Bubs blamed his failure to move enough product on the big losses Bubs was racking up – which also wound up in the courts.
Put it all together, though, and the band is very much back on the road at ADN.
Only time will tell whether the strategy is fit for a post-Covid era.
But it’s clear that not all of ADN’s shareholders are happy to be back on the daigou train. Nathan’s first AGM as chairman this week saw a first strike against ADN’s pay report, an 18 per cent vote against his election as a director, and a 20 per cent vote against the issue of options to the chairman. NE
Passion for fashion
Property developer Theo Onisforou is chucking a lifeline to fashion plates Lesleigh Jermanus and Chris Buchanan. They’re the founders of designer label Alemias but they also own the historic Village Inn pub in the very haute part of Sydney’s Paddington, on Glenmore road, where, to quote Jonathan Franzen, the men come in all shapes and sizes but the women are all slim and 36.
Jermanus and Buchanan wanted to refurb the pub into a flagship store, claiming the venue was a financial white elephant. Woollahra Municipal Council, very much attached to this beloved old establishment, said nay, not happening.
An appeal against that decision was thrown out of the Land and Environment Court on Friday by Senior Commissioner Susan Dixon. Onisforou gave evidence at the hearings in August, saying he objected to the pub being replaced with “another homogenous dress shop”. Ha! Wonder what Zimmerman, or Gary Theodore of Scanlan Theodore, think of that.
Onisforou owns about 20 buildings in the surrounding precinct and wants the pub as a collector’s item.
In July, as litigation against the council began, he offered Jermanus and Buchanan $6.2m plus stamp duty costs to buy the building, which they didn’t accept.
Onisforou’s latest offer is to lease them a shop directly opposite the hotel so the pub can be left untouched. Or, alternatively, per the previous offer, to sell it to him entirely.
“I am happy to buy the building from you at a market price,” Onisforou wrote to them a month ago.
No reply yet, and the offer’s still open. Now that the appeal has been squashed, perhaps a change of heart might be afoot? YB
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