David Sharma’s Wentworth gig:It’s who you know that really counts

Cartoon: Rod Clement

The Liberal Party’s new candidate for Wentworth, David Sharma, could have gained the preselection on the strength of his contact book alone.

For four years in the Middle East, Sharma laid out the welcome mat to delegations of Australian pollies, business folk and richies visiting Israel and its hi-tech economy.

Indeed, that’s how the 42-year-old landed his gig working with entrepreneurial Sydney ­accountant Brett Kelly.

Margin Call can reveal the two first met last October in Israel during the Pratt family’s ­dinner to mark the 100-year anniversary of the Battle of Beersheba. It was during that encounter at Anthony Pratt’s Beersheba barbecue that Kelly offered the highly recommended Sharma a job.

Since the start of this year the budding pollie has been heading the ASX-listed Kelly Partners government relations practice, which was built around Sharma and his little black book of contacts.

The Liberal candidate for Wentworth has 49 per cent of that new arm of the wider $57 million firm, which is expected to soon be collapsed following Sharma’s accelerated entry into politics.

Sharma is also a director and advisory board member of Kelly’s philanthropic Kelly Partners Scholars, which offers entrepreneurial scholarships for study tours to Israel.

The outfit was only formed in March, with Sharma on its advisory board alongside the chairman of everything David Gonski (who was one of Sharma’s Wentworth references), Woolies director and Woollahra resident Jillian Broadbent, former public service boss Peter Shergold, tech investor Jon Shein and former Hoyts boss and investor Peter Ivany (who lives in Wentworth’s Point Piper).

It will be up to the Liberal Party machine to decide whether that charitable role can continue.

And the Sydney north shore-residing Sharma embarks on his eastern suburbs tilt with a handy back-up plan.

“If the people of Wentworth don’t want Dave to work for them, I’m more than happy to have him come back to work for us,” Kelly told Margin Call yesterday evening.

IR back on agenda

Here’s one that will interest ACTU secretary Sally McManus and the “Change the Rules” gang.

Former Fair Work commissioner Graeme Watson was spotted at Parliament House in Canberra this week.

Watson spectacularly resigned from the Iain Ross-led industrial relations tribunal early last year, denouncing the Rudd-Gillard creation as “partisan, dysfunctional and divided”.

His destination in Canberra?

Former Fair Work commissioner Graeme Watson. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

The office of Kelly O’Dwyer, the new Industrial Relations minister.

Interesting.

Margin Call hears Watson, a former partner at law firm Freehills, is expected to soon join O’Dwyer’s office as a senior adviser.

That would be as clear a sign as any that new PM Scott Morrison and O’Dwyer are keen to put industrial relations back at the heart of the Coalition’s agenda.

We bet the street-fighting McManus can’t wait for the showdown.

Carp on the spot

Unfortunately, medical entrepreneur Brandon Carp didn’t get back to us yesterday to give his account of his firm Unified Healthcare Group’s inglorious cameo this week at Kenneth Hayne’s royal commission.

Unified Healthcare Group, or UHG, was employed by life insurer TAL years into its eight-year battle to deny a nurse her worker’s compensation claim.

Along with hiring a private investigator to conduct a creepy four-month surveillance of the nurse, TAL employed a psychiatrist from UHG to do a “specialist case review”.

Ultimately, the hired specialist from Carp’s UHG gave the answer its client TAL wanted: it disagreed with the Financial Services Ombudsman and said the claim was not supported.

Counsel assisting Rowena ‘Shock And’ Orr was not impressed with UHG’s “supposedly independent psychiatrist”.

To go by emails tendered to the commission, the UHG operative — who made use of the private investigators’ video work — seemed to take a perverse enjoyment in the assignment.

“It’s totally inappropriate,” said TAL’s general manager of claims Loraine van Eeden of “belittling” correspondence between UHG and TAL about the client.

David Thodey and Brandon Carp. Picture: Adam Yip

So what does Carp make of his company’s role in the harrowing case study?

We’re not sure. He didn’t return our calls.

The Melbourne-based medical entrepreneur has reason to be sensitive.

Not long after it ended its pursuit of the nurse, a posse of high-profile investors bought into his business and joined his board, including former Telstra boss David Thodey, SquarePeg’s Justin Liberman and Five V Capital’s Adrian Mackenzie.

Wonder what they made of this week’s revelations?

Follow the leader

In June, Wilson Asset Management chairman Geoff Wilson proudly called 2018 the “golden age” of listed investment companies, as he rang the opening bell on his oversubscribed $466m LIC WAM Global Limited, the first Wilson vehicle to focus on shares outside of the ASX.

Given WAM’s relative lack of expertise investing outside our shores, there was naturally great interest among its rivals about what would be the fund’s biggest positions.

So you can imagine the interest at Robert Luciano’s VGI Partners and Ashok Jacob’s Ellerston Capital when they took a look at WAM’s July investment newsletter, which revealed that three of its maiden picks included the US-listed CME Group and The Stars Group and the UK-listed Entertainment One.

CME just happens to be the biggest bet of Luciano’s fund, VGI Global Investments, while Ellerston Capital’s listed Global Investments Portfolio has stakes in Stars and Entertainment One.

In unrelated news, VGI has ended its relationship with Wilson’s $400m charitable Future Generation Global Investments.

VGI was a foundation manager of the charitable fund, along with the likes of Ellerston, Manikay Partners, Antipodes, Neuberger Berman and Paradice Investment Management.

Luciano’s outfit has transferred the $40m it was managing for Wilson’s fund into a new charitable fund known as the VGI Partners Foundation.

If the investment ideas are yours, why not get the credit as well?