Charges to make the eyes water

Cartoon: Rod Clement.

We weren’t wrong to take a keen interest in NAB veteran staffer Rosemary Rogers’ property portfolio. Holy dooley!

Margin Call’s eyes almost popped out of our head yesterday morning, on level 4 of the Sydney’s Downing Centre, as we went through the list of charges the NSW police have served on Rogers.

Rosemary Rogers is released on bail from the Sydney Police Centre at Surry Hills.

The woman who for nine years was perhaps Cameron Clyne’s and then his successor as NAB CEO, Andrew Thorburn’s most trusted employee at the bank — allegedly — has one hell of an appetite for risk.

Beginning on August 14, 2014 — exactly a fortnight after Thorburn replaced Clyne as NAB’s CEO and Rogers’ direct boss — Rogers allegedly had $128,555 of patio work done on her weekender at Bellbrae, near Torquay.

The Human Group’s Helen Rosamond allegedly paid for that work by All Seasons Patios as part of her efforts to secure $40 million of contracts with NAB for her executive perks and travel business.

Rogers had further plans for her four-bedroom rural Victorian retreat.

Beginning on May 20, 2016 — with Thorburn, who sat all of 5m away from Rogers, now two years into his energetic period running NAB — Rogers began $468,726 more of renovations to make her weekender fit for a banking CEO’s domineering chief-of-staff.

As with more than $3.9m of alleged eye-watering excess, Rosamond allegedly picked up the tab for the alterations and additions — on the living room, kitchen, pantry and master bedroom — on the Bellbrae property. Geelong-based builder R&B Kahle did the work.

Rogers wasn’t done yet.

And her risk appetite had — allegedly — assumed elephantine proportions.

On September 15, 2017, Rosamond’s Human Group paid the $380,000 deposit on Rogers’ new trophy home in ­Melbourne’s Williamstown, which that month Rogers agreed to buy for $3.8m.

Rogers might have been a banking executive’s assistant rather than a banking executive herself, but clearly she was a woman with a taste for luxury the equal of many on Thorburn’s executive team.

The final benefit Rogers allegedly received from Rosamond, according to the NSW police charge sheet, was a relatively modest $7500 in marina fees paid on December 12, 2017, for the berth of a boat.

(Rogers had allegedly been given two by Rosamond in the previous years: a $46,090 Bayliner speedboat back in March 2014, in the Clyne era, and a swisher “Chaparral” speedboat in April 2016 in the Thorburn era.)

The day after her marina fee was paid, Rogers was recalled by Thorburn for an urgent meeting.

She had been on leave to move into her new Williamstown home.

By the end of their meeting, Rogers had resigned, ending her more than 20-year career at NAB, almost half of it right at the bank’s pinstriped heart.

It sure reads like it was fun while it lasted.

Housing horrors

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s confrontational approach to his controversial mega portfolio looks to be rubbing off on the cashed-up operators of his refugee detention centre on Manus Island.

Adelaide-based detention centre operator Ian Stewart, one of the principals of the Paladin group that runs the Morrison government’s East Lorengau refugee transit centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus, has taken his suburban neighbour to court.

At the same time as he is facing intense scrutiny over Paladin’s $423 million deal to run things for Dutton on Manus, Stewart and his University of Adelaide academic wife Talei Stewart have been duking it out with their next-door neighbours Jamie and Gary Aswegen.

The Stewarts bought their two storey modern home in the City of Churches’ fashionable inner city suburb of Norwood in October 2017 for $1.925m.

In September, less than a year after buying their new town home, the Stewarts — via their Lengakiki Holdings vehicle — kicked off civil proceedings in the South Australian Supreme Court before Judge Katrina Bochner against the Aswegens, claiming encroachment on their land.

The Aswegens have owned their property since 2005.

Margin Call hears that the Stewarts are seeking no less than an order to have their neighbour’s historic 1800s worker’s cottage demolished.

The matter is next listed for hearing in early April.

Further from Adelaide — but closer than Manus — the cashed-up couple have also been active in the property market on Kangaroo Island, where they have a holiday home and have been considering a potential $5m purchase of a major tourism operation.

No bad reports yet from their neighbours over there.

Shorten’s sweet

The night before Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned the Sydney business community about the dangers of a Labor government, where was Bill Shorten?

He was giving a keynote to the business community in Melbourne at the Park Hyatt. It was the night of the Federal Labor Business Forum dinner with Shorten and his shadow ministry.

Ominously for Morrison and those in his ministry planning to stick around after the election, we gather it was a packed room.

The Forum is one of Labor’s biggest sources of funds, behind its fellow travellers in the union movement and, while they might not know it, addicts of Labor-owned pokies machines.

Drinks behemoth Lion was a sponsor of the dinner. Lion’s CEO Stuart Irvine gets on well with Shorten, so no surprise there. And the night’s major sponsor was Colin Tate’s outfit Conexus Financial, which runs events for the finance and wealth industry and publishes I nvestment Magazine and Professional Planner.

Stuart Irvine, CEO of Lion Nathan

So there you go: Shorten’s not entirely without friends in the business world.