Tim Holding raising donations for French chateau renovations; leaked emails on Sympli, PEXA stoush
Buried deep within a cloud of puff written about Tim Holding’s restoration of a French chateau this week is a crumb of news that he’ll be visiting Melbourne later this month, cap in hand, raising donations for this self-enriching vanity project.
Bear in mind, Holding is a former Victorian Labor minister who left parliament in 2013 on a taxpayer-funded pension in the realm of $150,000 per annum (no longer available to newly elected MPs).
He’s also marrying Felicity Selkirk, an heiress to the Selkirk Bricks empire, her father, Iain, having been a director until 2018.
The 235-year-old Chateau de Purnon has 105 rooms and, if it’s remotely authentic, the spirits of a thousand reclusive pamphleteers and chaps in powdered wigs still haunting its chambres.
Bought for $1.19m, everyone expects that it’ll end up being flogged off for a great deal more once the dry moat and wine cellars and boulangerie (seriously) are returned to decent nick.
The people are already paying for this guy to yuk it up in the French countryside.
Now, in the ultimate act of piss-taking, he’s asking punters to help him pay for it.
C’est incroyable!
If there’s any humour to be spotted then it’s the admission that he’s no “outdoor specialist”. Of course, most Victorians already knew that.
Reform rage
It’s harder to think of an issue more technical and beltway and duller than a week in prison than the war still raging over reforms to the e-conveyancing market. Thankfully, Margin Call is in receipt of leaked emails that enliven the telling.
In April we reported on the very cosy relationship between Victor Dominello and the upstart firm Sympli. The former NSW customer service minister coddled and nurtured Sympli’s reform agenda while he was in government and Sympli reciprocated in kind, lavishing praise on Dominello as a “real leader and advocate”, which he utterly adored.
Few were surprised when one of his senior advisers, Jerome Boutelet, ended up taking a job with Sympli once the Liberal Party was turfed from office at the election. That much was guaranteed from the downright collusion that’s come to light in these emails between the minister’s office and the company’s CEO.
The supposed villain in this story is Property Exchange Australia, the dominant market player – Sympli wanted access to their e-conveyancing architecture (for property settlements, refinancing transactions, and so on) and Dominello spent years trying to open it up for them. PEXA, as it’s known, was likened to Apple in one of Dominello’s 2018 speeches in Sydney.
“That last thing I want is another Apple that basically says, ‘You use my ecosystem and that’s it and we’ll charge you a premium for it’. We want that interoperability. So, I’m having a bit of a stoush with them (PEXA) on that.”
To get what they wanted, the minister’s office and Sympli’s leadership were basically running back-channel comms and jointly managing press articles in the AFR and The Australian. No other player was given the same privilege, as far as we can tell, least of all PEXA.
“Below are some lines that we thought could be considered by the Minister,” wrote Sympli’s CEO Philip Joyce in June 2021, providing some talking points for Dominello. That’s after his people emailed Joyce with a heads-up that an article was going to appear in The Australian.
In other correspondence, Joyce was looped in on emails with Dominello’s advisers as they grumbled about an AFR article that didn’t feature quotes from the minister. When a flak advised that the article had been amended, Joyce replied: “Great work team. Much appreciated.” Again, this is the CEO of a for-profit entity competing for lucrative market share.
Deadlines on reform proposals were guided by Sympli’s schedule, according to one email sent among bureaucrats and the minister’s office. In another, the MO circulated Sympli’s suggestions for how PEXA could be punished using price regulation.
Sympli was even given a slight edge over PEXA at a ministerial roundtable, held in October 2021. “I do have one ‘ask’ for the session,” wrote Joyce in an email to Dominello’s office ahead of the meeting. “I’m hoping we can go after PEXA on the agenda (alphabetically that follows). This will give me an opportunity to rebut any assertions. Thanks.”
“We will see what we can do,” Boutelet, now working for Sympli, responded. Friends in high places, eh?
Asked about this unusual level of co-operation, Joyce went on the attack against PEXA and described the company as doing everything in its power “to protect its hundreds of millions in annual revenue, and starve its competitors out of the market”.
Dominello, a talented self-promoter, didn’t respond to questions by deadline.
Bark silenced
The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies tore off the bandaid on Monday night, announcing that CEO Darren Bark had resigned with immediate effect.
There was no explanation, but Margin Call reported last week that Bark had taken an abrupt leave of absence and that lawyers were involved, apparently so Bark could make a case to stay.
Evidently that didn’t work out. A press statement confirming the departure noted Bark’s achievements, including his success pushing for legislation banning Nazi symbols in NSW, securing funding commitments from the state government, and leading the Jewish peak body through the Covid-19 pandemic (even managing a blowing of the shofar on the holy days).
Looks like it’s ended on somewhat peaceable terms, with Bark, once a staffer to former NSW deputy premier Troy Grant, given the final word in the release and wishing the JBD success in the future.
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