Fairfax’s Antony Catalano faces court over drink driving

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Christmas can be a financially draining period when you have eight kids, but the stars have aligned to make sure Fairfax Media executive Antony Catalano will be cashed up to fight his appeal against a drink-driving pinch, which is due back in court next Thursday.

Boss Greg Hywood may tool around in a Maserati, but the Cat has been a passenger since August last year, when Victorian magistrate Paul Smith cancelled his licence for 16 months for blowing 0.08 after a booze binge in seaside Sorrento.

The court heard the Cat initially refused to blow in the bag, saying he had chest pains.

His lawyer, former Army commando Peter Billings, plans to challenge the conviction during the two-day appeal in Melbourne’s County Court.

Luckily, a whack of the shares Catalano got last year for flogging his real estate mag empire Metro Media Publishing to Fairfax came out of escrow on New Year’s Day, so he can sell them off — if he hasn’t already.

About 9.65 million Fairfax shares, worth about $8.5 million, can now be sold, but how many are Cat’s is unknown, as Fairfax has only disclosed the total amount issued to him and his fellow MMP owners of about 68.5 million ($53.5m).

Mystery also surrounds the terms of the deal, with Fairfax issuing contradictory ASX announcements. On January 12 last year it said the shares would be “subject to performance linked escrow arrangements”.

But when it doled them out on February 20, all mention of “performance” was gone.

In addition, some 8.6 million shares weren’t subject to escrow at all.

Almost 29 million more — worth $25m-odd — are in play on July 1.

Fairfax flack Brad Hatch declined to comment.

Copping a serve

Streaming music service Guvera is back on a marketing blitz, this time piggybacking off the taste in tunes of top tennis talent including Andy Murray and Madison Keys — but the company’s financial results show an outfit in more pain than Keys when she lost to Chinese qualifier Zhang Shuai on Monday after a nasty leg injury.

Guvera’s Australian Open “partner” agreement is the latest in a series of pricey promos from the Gold Coast-based company, headed by AMMA Private Equity’s Darren Herft.

It was last seen at Flemington among the Birdcage millionaires, taking out a marquee during the spring carnival.

And before that it was the “streaming media partner” to Nine’s The Voice.

But none of this racket served up profit in 2014-15.

Sales revenue more than doubled — from $400,000 to $1.18m — but operating costs ballooned almost sevenfold, from $5m to $34.2m.

Guvera declared a loss of $81.1m, more than double the previous $29.6m, and earned itself a going-concern note from auditors Ernst & Young.

In a further foot fault, it’s also suing a former director, lawyer Michael De Vere, over last year’s botched acquisition of British business Blinkbox, whose former employees are in turn suing Guvera for £10m.

The case hasn’t been heard but the Federal Court has slapped a freeze order over De Vere’s Queensland property and his shares in Guvera.

Despite all that, investors tipped $60m into Guvera during the year and another $20m between July 1 and October 20, when Herft signed the report.

A planned IPO in 2015 fell over “due to a number of factors”, including licensing delays, but Herft told investors to look out for news “at the commencement of 2016”.

Digital divide

Telstra’s new-ish boss Andy Penn has again razored the Telstra Digital division run by tech guru Gerd Schenkel, laying off contractors on Thursday.

While former CEO David Thodey was a big fan of Schenkel and Telstra Digital, Penn seems less keen.

The cuts follow the outsourcing to India of jobs in the studio within Telstra Digital, which looks after Telstra’s ginormous website, last year (Margin Call, September 25).

Those hung up on come from Deloitte, IE Digital and Finxl.

India is also under the gun, but front-end devs have been spared.

Telstra’s flack said it had “re-scaled our contractor workforce” and contractor hours in both Australia and Mumbai would be cut by 50 per cent, effective early next month.

Schenkel, who has a degree in robotics and a habit of landing on his cowboy boots no matter what, appears unfazed.

On Friday he was tweeting out footage of a rocket test run.

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