Club brawl heats up as WA and ACT depart; Yolo founder sinks his teeth into compo from scoundrels
Once a powerful industry body, Clubs Australia is at risk of total disintegration after two of its core members ditched the group in drastic fashion this month over an ongoing power struggle with its financial backers in NSW.
In the past fortnight, ClubsACT and ClubsWA have both unanimously voted to renounce their membership of Clubs Australia due to disagreements with ClubsNSW chief executive Rebecca Riant.
An accompanying liver shot came with the resignation a couple of weeks ago of long-serving Clubs Australia president Maurice Reilly (the same impeccably connected Reilly who runs the National Press Club). He’s calling it quits after helming ClubsACT for 20 years and Clubs Australia for the past seven.
Riant holds the joint role of executive director at Clubs Australia alongside her substantive role at ClubsNSW, where she was named CEO in 2023 following stints at Tabcorp and Star Entertainment Group. Much of the angst afflicting Clubs Australia can be traced to Riant, her chair, Sallianne Faulkner, and their vision for transformation of the national body.
It’s not just WA and the ACT walking out; more member states and territories are considering their positions, apparently, complaining as they have about the financial administration and transparency of the federated body, but also a power grab launched by NSW last year to expand its control over the industry group.
Clubs Australia holds just a couple of meetings annually, but when it does convene its eight member associations they are each given a vote regardless of their financial input, all of them considered equal. Unhappy with that arrangement, NSW wants voting power doled out in line with the funding each state and territory contributes. Given its very deep pockets, NSW would effectively run the show if such an agreement were to be reached. A spokesman for ClubsNSW said he was unable to respond by the deadline provided.
And if all of this seems terribly in the weeds and of marginal interest and maximal ho-hum, just remember that public holidays and the shuttering of markets and the dearth of any real news happening, anywhere – except for the sudden death of the Pope, which broke too closely to our deadline – well, these pose very real challenges to column-writing and the procurement of gossip and ultimately amount to what we in the business simply call, with a long sigh, a very slow news day.
Criminals fingered
Having found himself in the midst of a kidnapping plot in Estonia last year, online casino magnate and billionaire Tim Heath went not for the jugular, as the saying goes, but for the assailant’s finger, thwarting the alleged abduction attempt by practically biting the dude’s digit right off.
Grim stuff, but it worked. Heath emerged mostly unscathed from the incident (although he no longer has a taste for life in Estonia).
Originally from regional Victoria, he had built up a thriving gambling empire in the Baltic city of Tallinn, employing hundreds of people, many of them Australians, and amassing a fortune in wealth under the banner of Yolo Group.
Two of the four men involved in the abduction attempt – Azeri nationals – were later arrested and remanded in custody. Hardly criminal masterminds, the quartet dressed as painters and tried to grab Heath from the stairwell of his apartment in the Old Town of Tallinn, fleeing on foot and leaving behind a passport in a getaway vehicle. Local reporting tells us that the other two men involved are still at large.
And while all of this transpired on July 29, it now seems that Heath is back for a second bite, so to speak, of the two men in custody. He’s filed with the Harju County Court what the Estonian press has dubbed “one of the largest damages claims” in the country’s legal history. Not hard, it’s a very small country, only 1.37 million people.
Heath is seeking more than $6m in compensation to cover his security expenses since the incident, plus a further amount for “moral damage” which hasn’t been specified by the billionaire but which his lawyer, Lembit Tedder, would be a ballpark figure of another million euros based on “international precedent”.
Heath didn’t return a request for comment, but a lawyer for one of the defendants described the case as “utopian”. The lawyer for the second defendant said the case would end in acquittal.
Zage advice
Earlier this month we joked about Whitehaven Coal director George Raymond Zage and his loose habit of tweeting on social media platform X. At the time, Zage’s account bore 447 followers; that number has increased to 468 in the two weeks since our sniping.
We don’t expect Zage to thank us for this profitless signal-boosting of his remarks, but even if it’s only another 20 people, there’s clearly a growing audience for his untrammelled belief in Donald Trump, trade tariffs (“ultimately deflationary”) and the brilliance of Elon Musk.
Sadly, and as we keep noting, Zage’s views don’t always gel with the stated positions of Whitehaven’s leadership, particularly on the matter of Ukraine, which Whitehaven supported with hefty shipments of thermal coal in 2022, to firm up its energy security and independence. The company then said it would dispatch a second shipment of thermal coal, a year ago, if it was asked to do so by the government.
Zage is clearly no fan of Volodymyr Zelensky and was hardly impressed by the Ukranian president’s sensational Oval Office stoush with Trump in late February. Regardless, he has always exhibited a level of self-control in his expression of distaste.
Until now. Five days after we reported on his misgivings about Zelensky, Zage doubled-down even harder on Twitter. “Ukraine is an unquestionably corrupt country,” Zage announced, “so vested interests will always have an economic interest in the status quo. The money flowing in for military and aid isn’t all going for military and aid … and even direct shipments of military goods can be resold for cash.”
Quite the allegation, very much at odds with the leadership of Whitehaven.
Surely they wouldn’t be repeatedly offering to help a foreign government if they believed, as Zage clearly does, that it’s so unspeakably corrupt?
We put this all to Whitehaven’s chair, Mark Vaile, but, just the same as last time, he wasn’t in the mood to respond.
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