Charities regulator probes Teal backer Simon Holmes a Court’s Smart Energy Council

Australia’s charities regulator is reviewing the relationship between Simon Holmes a Court’s Smart Energy Council and new campaigning outfit Smart Voting Pty Ltd. Cartoon: Rod Clement.

At a minute to midnight, the Australian charities regulator has decided to review the relationship between Simon Holmes a Court’s Smart Energy Council and new campaigning outfit Smart Voting Pty Ltd for a possible breach of charity rules.

The review follows a complaint last week to the charities regulator from NSW Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg concerning the relationship between Smart Voting and the SEC.

Bragg has questioned whether Smart Voting’s campaigning activities during the Federal election mean that SEC’s parent charity, Australian Solar Energy Society Ltd, has breached charity laws to threaten the entity’s tax-free status.

Smart Voting and SEC share a range of key stakeholders, ­including directors, financial controllers and company ­secretaries.

Charitable vehicles are prevented from campaigning for parties or individuals. If Smart Voting and SEC are found by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission to be associated, the parent Australian Solar Energy Society could be forced to pay tax on its income at the prevailing corporate tax rate.

The matter is now being assessed by the ACNC’s “compliance area” for review and consideration”.

Holmes a Court is a director of SEC and also of Climate 200, which is financially backing a range of “teal” independents. High-profile doctor Monique Ryan in Melbourne’s Kooying remains a strong possibility to beat Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in the former Victorian blue ribbon seat.

Holmes a Court was on Wednesday filmed by Frydenberg amid a heated confrontation with Liberal Senator for Victoria Jane Hume, as the clock ticks towards polling day on Saturday.

Meanwhile, businessman Holmes a Court, who is the son of Australia’s first billionaire, the late Robert Holmes a Court, and lives in Frydenberg’s electorate, has sought assistance far and wide for his political endeavours.

His Perth-based mum, Janet Holmes a Court, who is one of Australia’s wealthiest women, is one of the many donors to her son’s Climate 200 vehicle.

Liberals’ call to arms

There’s been a powerful call to arms for under-pressure candidate for Wentworth Dave Sharma in his down to the wire battle with teal independent Allegra Spender.

Sharma, a former Australian ambassador to Israel whose predecessor in the seat is former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, is being challenged by Holmes a Court-backed Spender, whose fashion doyenne mother Carla Zampatti passed away last year.

On Wednesday evening the call went out from powerful local fundraising arm, the Wentworth Forum, co-chaired by Bruce McWilliam and Fiona Playfair, for volunteers to man pre-polling booths for the rest of the week and hand out how-to-vote cards for Sharma.

McWilliam is a key lieutenant to industrialist billionaire Kerry Stokes, while Playfair is the wife of ex-Macquarie and UBS banker Matthew Playfair.

“We are firming in the polls, which is good news as everyone realises the enormity and significance of the choice,” they wrote to the local faithful.

“Dave is a wonderful and dedicated MP and we have to get him over the line so he can continue to work hard for us.”

A load of bull?

Cattle outfit AACo came through with a blinder on Thursday, posting an operating profit more than double that of last year’s effort and its highest net profit – $136.9m – since it first listed on the Australian Stock Exchange circa 2001.

And yet no sign of Hugh Killen, the company’s chief executive, who, yes, fielded a call with investors but was unavailable for interviews with scribes across media outlets, on what was otherwise a cloudless day for the company.

Anything to do, perchance, with the uncomfortable revelation of an alleged office affair – denied by Killen – that was raised with the CEO and the company’s board, and as reported by Margin Call in March?

Apparently not, said a company official, who shooed away our suspicions and said the results were simply pleasing enough to do the talking on their own, so there was no need to take further questions, a claim that sounds clearly and quite lazily embroidered.

We just hope AACo’s beef never tastes as mealy on the tongue.

Silence on Forrest

If Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest hoped his return to an executive role at Fortescue Metals Group would be received with rousing cheers and adulation from Australia’s stockbroking houses, then we expect he would have been disappointed during his morning briefings on Thursday.

Fortescue’s global search for a fresh CEO ended in the same room it started, leading Twiggy to observe that he was best suited to run the company. The resulting announcement on Wednesday triggered a blaze of publicity that dominated the business sheets.

But apart from Macquarie, which distributed a note so beige one could use it to paint a rental property, major sell-side analysts conspicuously ignored the announcement of his return as executive chairman.

Was it genuinely worthy of such emphatic indifference? Or was there a pragmatic explanation for this odd silence – would it have been, perhaps, ill-advised to publish unkind words about Forrest, lest he blacklist their respective banks?

Just speculating, of course.

Baird emerges

Former NSW premier Mike Baird will, it turns out, spend some time volunteering in the seat of Warringah on Saturday, despite allegedly and privately expressing some displeasure with the Liberal Party’s chosen candidate, Katherine Deves.

Margin Call had been told Baird would effectively boycott the seat and spend the day campaigning for Josh Frydenberg in Kooyong. But the former NAB executive strongly disputed that account.

He said he’ll be in Melbourne on Friday night giving a speech and therefore well-positioned for a spot of campaigning in Kooyong, followed by a return to NSW, and Warringah.

Baird is currently the chief executive of residential aged care provider HammondCare and resides in the Warringah electorate. As a member of the NSW parliament he represented the seat of Manly, whose boundaries fall within the federal seat.