Disaster to blaster for Terry McMaster of Dover Financial

Six months after he was literally stretchered out of Kenneth Hayn e’s royal commission, banned financial adviser Terry McMaster has found his voice.

McMaster, the brains behind the now shuttered Dover Financial Advisers Pty Ltd, has just lodged his response to Hayne’s royal commission interim report.

It’s a scorcher.

Not for the 57-year-old McMaster the usual fawning before former High Court justice Hayne.

“[U]nlike others, Dover cannot thank you for your diligence and thoroughness in preparing your report. There is no evidence of either quality insofar as Dover is concerned,” McMaster tells Hayne at the beginning of his remarkable 49-page return serve, lodged last week and first reported last night on Ticky on the Your Money channel.

To one of the nation’s most respected legal minds, McMaster (himself a lawyer by training) continues: “Your report needs to be corrected for obvious, numerous and serious factual ‘errors’ and the consequential incorrect conclusions you draw from them. I place ‘errors’ in inverted commas. I am being polite. To be less polite but more accurate, I put the phrase ‘deliberate misstatements’.”

MORE: Terry McMaster blasts Kenneth Hayne

That’s interesting approach to take with Hayne.

McMaster then documents — at great length, with helpful subheadings such as “Mr Costello’s questions were ambushes”, “What really happened” and “Do you know?” — how, in his opinion, the commission deliberately suppressed evidence about Dover to assist the corporate regulator ASIC’s “commercial goal of shutting Dover down”.

It reads like one hell of a conspiracy.

Terry McMaster’s response

“If this was deliberate you should be ashamed. If it was not deliberate you should be embarrassed. In either case a public apology is appropriate,” McMaster advises commissioner Hayne. With some optimism, McMaster — who says his royal commission and ASIC run-ins have triggered post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms — concludes the cover letter of his reply: “Please amend your Interim Report appropriately as soon as possible.”

Sources close to the commissioner tell Margin Call neither an apology nor an amendment are in train.

Battle continues

And to think, back in April it was ASIC’s financial adviser specialist Louise Macaulay who first sprang to Terry McMaster’s aid when he collapsed under questioning by counsel assisting Mark Costello.

McMaster’s 49-page response/manifesto shows he’s even filthier with the regulator, now under James Shipton’s management, than Hayne’s commission.

In June, ASIC cancelled Dover’s Australian Financial Services Licence, suddenly ending the careers of McMaster’s 300-strong army of advisers.

The regulator has also launched a civil case against McMaster. That resumes in the Federal Court on December 7.

McMaster is not done fighting yet.

Lessons learned

Taking an entirely different approach to life after the Kenneth Hayne experience is Sam Henderson.

The former high-profile money man announced his retirement from the financial advice business after a bruising appearance in the same round that roughed up McMaster.

And true to his word, Henderson has moved into a completely unrelated career — the online hamper business.

“It’s given me one hell of a shake-up,” Henderson told Margin Call in his first comments on life after the royal commission.

When we spoke over the phone, Henderson was in a warehouse — decked out in a high vis vest and steel capped boots — packing the hampers for his trio of online channels: Everything But Flowers, Men’s Gift Store and The Baby Gift Store.

“I’m not trying to take over the world,” says Henderson of his new business.

Like McMaster, Henderson feels his life in finance was presented sensationally in the royal commission.

But unlike McMaster, he seems to be at peace with his career change.

“Life goes on. You learn from your experiences,” he told us. “I’ve learned a hell of a lot.”

Abrupt exit

One more in our “Royal commission: where are they now?” series.

Former AMP chief legal counsel Brian Salter — the best man at former ASIC boss Greg Medcraft’s wedding — was spotted out for coffee yesterday morning at the footsteps of the Commonwealth Bank’s Sussex Street head office with McKinsey senior partner Angus Dawson.

Does a life in consulting loom for Salter?

Not in a hurry.

Margin Call understands Salter’s main focus remains the negotiation of his curious dismissal from AMP on April 30, the same day Catherine Brenner’s demise was announced.

AMP’s ASX statement at the time said the board was “unaware of and disappointed about” the extent of Salter’s engagement with Clayton Utz over a report on the financial shop’s fees-for-no-service escapade.

Subsequent information — not to mention Kenneth Hayne’s interim report — have firmed the view held by many onlookers that Salter was set up as AMP’s fall guy.

Rather than take the McMaster manifesto option, Salter — who remains between jobs — has engaged Arnold Bloch Leibler partner Jonathan Milner to assist his ongoing negotiations over his abrupt departure from the financial firm he served for 10 years.

High flyer

There’s a world out there beyond the Hayne Show.

Just ask Ivan Glasenberg.

The idiosyncratic Switzerland-based Glencore billionaire is visiting our shores.

Margin Call is pretty sure it was his Gulfstream G550 — retail price: $85 million — we spotted yesterday at Sydney Airport.

Ivan Glasenberg's Gulfstream

Glasenberg is meeting local stakeholders, giving a speech or two and, we hear, taking some London-based analysts to Glencore’s Hunter Valley coal operations.

We gather there’s no M&A in the works from the man — last valued at $8.3 billion — who three years ago attempted an ambitious takeover of Rio Tinto. Those were the days.