Feng shui finesses for Lin’s mansion; Law catching up with Palmer’s nephew
What’s that old saying: a builder’s work is never done? Well, even when it is, a feng shui master can still rubbish the job if the ch’i flow is off.
So it goes for young rich lister Jin Lin, founder of property developer Aqualand (chaired by Warwick Smith; estimated portfolio value $5.5bn) and son of Chinese property mogul Yi Lin, currently residing in Shanghai.
The younger Lin is best remembered for paying $52m straight out of university to buy Sydney’s Villa Igiea, a richly ornamented 10-bedroom mansion jutting out of a Vaucluse cul-de-sac, Queens Avenue, renowned for its spectacular views of the Harbour Bridge (and for being one of the city’s busiest make-out spots).
Lin completed the purchase in 2010 but renovations have futzed onward for almost 15 years, held up by at least eight applications to meddle with the place, according to records with Woollahra Council. The most extravagant of these landed in 2016 and pushed for a $22m reno to demolish the house next door and rebuild the site into a guest wing for the existing villa.
Spurred on by Lin’s neighbours, Woollahra Council fought hard to nix it but a court granted Lin the permission he needed last year to amalgamate both blocks. Matter settled? Not even close.
Lin is now back with a slew of “minor layout adjustments” to every level of his house and even the solar panel arrangements on his roof.
Nips and tucks have been ordered to the gym, to bedrooms one and two, the guest bedroom and ensuite, to the kids’ entertaining area and the powder room. Lodged a month ago, they’re still being assessed by the council’s local heritage officer.
Also spotted were swaps to the wardrobes and doorways and the locations of ensuite bathrooms … and Margin Call is reliably informed that all this interference is the result of a feng shui consultant having walked through the property and tut-tutting all the harmony blockages in the existing arrangements.
We put this to Aqualand and a spokesman shooed us away with: “Aqualand obviously won’t discuss matters relating to their team’s personal lives.”
Obviously.
Presumably Lin’s neighbours will have a complaint to lodge over this latest bid to finesse the place; they’ve done the same for every other modification Lin’s attempted.
For now, he’s said to be living at the home of his mother, Junhui Lin, in North Sydney, along with his wife and Aqualand executive Helkin He who, as reported over the weekend, was recently demoted as head of procurement and construction.
Doesn’t sound very harmonious. Maybe time for the feng shui adviser to take a walk through the Australia Square office?
Where’s Clive?
Clive Palmer’s fugitive nephew, Clive Mensink, is inching closer to being put on trial for contempt of court after adding another legal loss to his tally of courtroom failures this week.
The full bench of the Federal Court knocked back Mensink’s latest bid on Monday to unyoke himself from the threat of contempt, ruling that a trial should go ahead whether he shows his face in Australia or not.
The charges stem from Mensink’s refusal to comply with repeated orders that he answer questions over the collapse of Palmer’s Queensland Nickel in 2016, where Mensink was the sole director.
Having absconded that year, Mensink is thought to be holed up in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, where he has access to an apartment. Rogue sightings have been made of him tooling around town in a late-model Mercedes, this while pulling a yearly salary of $200,000 from his uncle’s mining interests.
And all while fending off a trial, with Justices Lisa Hespe, Wendy Abraham and Penelope Neskovcin dismissing his appeal in a relatively brief 62 paragraph judgment, a third of which was devoted to his long, sordid history of legal wrangling.
The court even published a useful ledger of Mensink’s losses, a total of six attempts to have the case against him dismissed – seven if you count an attempted appeal to the High Court knocked back in 2022.
Funny, too, because the charges remain one of the few loose ends from the collapse of Queensland Nickel in 2016, which left 800 Queenslanders out of work and creditors owed more than $300m.
QNI has since been returned to Palmer in a deal he cut in 2019 with the company’s liquidator, FTI, which said two months ago it recovered the $300m required to settle every claim.
So the world, evidently, has moved on without Mensink, who’s four years into a fight he keeps losing – and who still can’t return to Australia without facing arrest.
MinRes’s next gens
Chris Ellison gave a freewheeling interview to the West Australian newspaper last week defending claims of nepotism at Mineral Resources. And why not? Practically every other public company indulges in the same, he said. “I’ve got over 460 children of parents that work for MinRes,” he said. They’re not nepo-babies; at MinRes they call them ‘‘next gens’’.
Margin Call has learned that among this cohort of next gens was the son of former WA premier Mark McGowan, who retired from politics last year and months later took a job as a MinRes consultant.
A MinRes spokesman confirmed that McGowan’s son completed an internship last year but no longer works at the company. Did it start while McGowan was still in office?
The former premier didn’t respond to questions and MinRes itself had some trouble confirming the date.
Rytenskild eyes his old Tabcorp job
First Adam Rytenskild was dumped as Tabcorp CEO, now he’s won a Fair Work Commission case against it, so could he be plotting a return to the position since filled by Gillon McLachlan?
MinRes in game of cat and mouse
The Legal Practice Board of Western Australia is looking into MinRes and its lawyers’ conduct, which is interesting timing as its company secretary has just been made legal counsel to the board.