Darren Bark feels the bite at NSW Jewish Board of Deputies; Bubs spat getting mucky

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, where CEO Darren Bark has been put on unexpected leave – and he’s very unlikely to be returning.

There’s major upheaval under way at the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, where CEO Darren Bark has been put on unexpected leave just over two years after his appointment – and he’s very unlikely to be returning.

The developments are being kept quiet by JBD officials, who didn’t respond to emails and, when eventually reached, declined to comment on the matter. Bark’s employment hasn’t been formally terminated but we hear lawyers are involved and that’s never a great sign.

Another less-than-reassuring signal for Bark is that officials have apparently approached long-serving former CEO Vic Alhadeff to return as his replacement. Alhadeff stepped down two years ago following a 17-year stint and Margin Call understands that he’s already said no to the offer. We tried putting it to Alhadeff but he declined to comment (attempts to reach Bark were also made).

No firm word on what Bark’s actually done to get tapped, and while he certainly garnered a favourable following in some quarters, it would be uncontroversial to suggest he wasn’t exactly beloved by others.

The board itself is tasked with lobbying government on matters relevant to the Jewish community and it’s an organisation administered by no shortage of machers.

Honorary life members include Justice Stephen Rothman and Robert Goot SC, its honorary solicitor is King & Wood Mallesons partner Paul Schroder, and its current president, David Ossip, is chief commercial officer at the Nicholas Moore-backed software company ­Willow.

Watch this space

Lawyers representing Bubs Australia claimed to have uncovered a slew of allegedly unauthorised expenses racked up by former CEO Kristy Carr. The dates and dollar amounts of these splurges were duly filed against Carr as part of her legal action against Bubs – that’s after the board unceremoniously dumped her in March.

It’s all getting a bit mucky between them. Bubs engaged McGrathNicol to conduct a forensic review of Carr’s spending and that turned up no shortage of receipts between January 2022 and her departure in May.

The particulars tell part of the story: a $12,050 spend on women’s clothing from Giorgio Armani; a few hundred bucks on a massage at the Ritz Carlton in Los Angeles; some $3807 on personal flights from the US to Greece. Carr, naturally, has offered explanations for each of these spending items.

Former Bubs CEO Kristy Carr. Picture: Getty Images

But it’s the $8227 allegedly blown on a Panerai ‘‘Ferrari 007’’ luxury watch that’s captured Margin Call’s attention. Bubs’ lawyers at Herbert Smith Freehills helpfully listed the proof of this spending in the cross-claim, citing a receipt for the watch from Presence Media Group, LLC, dated January 11, 2022.

A media company selling watches? That’s not our understanding of how Presence Media makes a crust.

A quick scan of the internet suggests they specialise in online marketing and the deployment of inexplicably popular shills on social media (read: influencers).

Receipts seen by Margin Call suggest that rather than a watch, the $8227 appears to have been spent contracting the high-decibel megaphones of “no-nonsense mom blogger” Meghan King and former Home And Away actor Tammin Sursok, both of whom were given some cash to plug the infant milk formula brand.

Our only question is how Freehills found its way from that to a Ferrari-branded timepiece? Anything to do with Presence Media’s CEO, who just happens to be named Camillo Ferrari? Surely the lawyers wouldn’t be so daft to make such a random leap of induction, or so one would hope.

Certainly not the fault of McGrathNicol, we hear. They told the Freehills lawyers during the forensic review process that they couldn’t find any evidence substantiating a spend on a luxury watch. Looks like the lawyers pressed ahead with the claim anyway. Not to mention that the actual watch, according to Margin Call’s enquiries, costs way more than $8227.

Faction fiction

GovConnex is a research firm started by the silver-tongued Michael Photios and his affable allies from Liberal lobby group PremierNational, namely Ian Hancock and Cooper Blair-Darling.

Photios jumped off the GovConnex board in January 2022 but still holds a good number of shares in the firm, which put out an “issues briefing” a few days ago to its subscribers and stakeholders.

“Factions & Unions in Australia’s Labor Party: Everything you need to know,” thundered the title of this paper, and frankly that’s about as enlivening as the reading got over the next 12 pages.

Michael Photios left the GovConnex board in January last year. Picture: Jason Edwards

Several pearls of insight adorn the document, including that there are “two important factions” in the Labor Party, that “within the factions, there are sub-factions”, that unions are “often affiliated with the various factions and sub-factions” and, the piece de resistance, that “not all MPs and constituents are factionally aligned”. That last one shocked us.

Ho-hum and harmless as these observations might be, there are genuine points of fact worthy of cavilling over with the GovConnex authors.

Firstly, former NSW Labor leader Jodi McKay is not a member of the left faction, as the document so confidently asserts – she was certainly a member of the right faction while she was a member of parliament (which the authors don’t seem to realise is no longer the case), and somehow her name has ended up preceding that of “Anthony Alabnese” (sic) and Tanya Plibersek in the order of seniority.

A second point is the GovConnex document continually enjoins readers to note that Labor’s sub-factions are known as “fractions”. This is straight-up news to many hardened ALP operatives who’ve been passing the document around all weekend.

Lastly, and maybe most sloppy, is the repeated references to the “CFMMEU”, and not the CFMEU, as it’s known these days.