Filings offer a clue to Fox empire carve-up

Illustration Rod Clement

There finally appears to be some movement when it comes to one of the longest-running sagas on the Melbourne corporate scene, the carving-up of billionaire Lindsay Fox’svast empire worth $4.18bn on this year’s edition of The List — Australia’s Richest 250.

For a good four years or so, Fox has been trying to get his family to agree to how the Linfox trucking business, property holdings and assets such as its half-share of the $1bn Essendon Airport and Avalon Airport would be divvied up.

But he has not had much luck, despite calling on the expertise of advisers ranging from Arnold Bloch Leibler, ex-PwC boss Luke Sayers and family business guru David Smorgon in recent years. The thrashing out of who gets what among the five children of Lindsay and Paula Fox is said to have been a difficult process at times.

But some recent filings with the corporate regulator may shed some light on what could end up happening with the main Linfox business, a trucking and logistics behemoth that takes in more than $2.7bn in annual ­revenue.

Linfox Proprietary Limited has until this month been owned by Lindsay, who founded the business in 1956 with one truck, and wife Paula’s LE & PG Fox Partnership.

But documents recently lodged with ASIC show the ownership being transferred to an entity named LEPGF Pty Ltd, which is in turn owned by several intriguingly named and recently formed companies.

Fox Founders Pty Ltd owns 30 per cent and Fox Future Fund Pty Ltd another 20 per cent, but the remaining 50 per cent is owned in equal 10 per cent portions by ALF No 1 Pty Ltd, DEF No 1 Pty Ltd, KMF No 1 Pty Ltd, LJF No 1 Pty Ltd and PDF No 1 Pty Ltd.

And what do those all acronyms mean? Well, they stand for the exact initials of the kids: Andrew Fox, David Fox, Katrina Fox, Lisa Fox and Peter Fox.

For now, all those companies are owned by Lindsay and Paula. But Margin Call reckons the paper shuffling is a precursor to a carve-up finally being agreed on. Watch this space.

Hackett’s fintech role

CampaignAgent, dubbed Afterpay for real estate vendors and their listing agents, has taken a big step in securing the services of former MLC Life boss David Hackett.

Hackett, who stepped down from the insurance firm in January, will be chairman at the Melbourne-based financial technology company.

His appointment comes as it has completed a Series B capital raising of $4.5m led by existing shareholder Capital Zed. The raising takes the total capital raised to $15.9m, including significant contributions from the company’s 2015 co-founders Shaun Moriarty and Seth Watts. They’ve had the backing of the Smorgon family, South Yarra arts patrons Sam and Tania Brougham, and Michael and Helen Abeles.

Since being launched in January 2017, CampaignAgent has assisted more than 60,000 vendors sell their homes. Its flagship product provides a pay-later solution for vendor paid advertising (VPA).

Hackett, who was named 2019 CEO of the year by The CEO Magazine, has been quiet since his January departure from MLC, where he had been its inaugural chief in 2016.

He had previously been executive general manager insurance for NAB’s wealth management business.

Apparently Hackett has been preoccupied over the past six months with assisting Lauriston Girls’ School get through the COVID-19 crisis.

His LinkedIn advises he’s still looking for other roles in financial services, or an “industry open for growth, transformation and disruption”.

A vintage estate sale

Loggerheads, the Hunter Valley vineyard estate whispered to have been sold to Miranda Kerr, has settled at $6.9m, a drop short of its $7.5m hopes.

The seven-bedroom homestead was bought by a company controlled by Melbourne law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler, which seems to have adopted the standard US practice for celebrities to buy in trustee companies to endeavour to hide their ownership identity.

Margin Call reckons should the Sydney-born Kerr fly in with her tech genius husband Evan Spiegel, word will soon emerge on the Pokolbin grapevine. She stayed at the estate as a holiday tenant in Christmas 2015 with her Gunnedah-based family.

The large estate would be work for a two-week quarantine, a la Nicole Kidman’sfacility Bunya Hill at Sutton Forest in the Southern Highlands. Although Kerr has been sitting out the pandemic beachside at Malibu.

Loggerheads was sold by QT Hotels, controlled by Alan Rydge, who had paid $6m in 2016 when it was bought from former Macquarie director Robin Crawford and his wife, Judy. They had purchased the estate from Len Evans Holdings for $5.15m in 2008. Evans had bought the estate from the Tyrrell winemaking family, a truly wonderful provenance.

Machiavelli cleans up

The dining favourite of many of the city’s powerbrokers, Machiavelli Ristorante, has closed for a few days. It is to undertake a COVID-19 clean after the management ascertained a diner at a table of three earlier this week had put the restaurant among the swath of Sydney restaurants further suffering amid the pandemic.

The Clarence Street eatery has been operated by Nicolae Bicher since 2015. The restaurant has been recently cautiously operating with their devoted patrons limited to 50 every session given the required social distancing restrictions.

Bicher took over from its founder Giovanna Toppi, who had run the show with her daughters Paola and Caterina. They opened the restaurant in 1988 with its black-vested waiters, the legendary Ricky Spinelli and Franco Perez, who served Margin Call countless steak dianes and crepe suzettes over the years while watching the parade of photographic portraits of the city’s movers and shakers get hung or removed from the restaurant walls.

Of course Niccolo Machiavelli, who died in 1527, noted the plague of his era was a metaphor for what happened in the medieval body politic when misrule and corruption were allowed to prevail.

He wrote in his famous tome, The Prince, that “what physicians say about consumptive illness is applicable here: that at the beginning, such an illness is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been recognised or treated at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure”.

Bicher, who represented Australia in judo at the 1984 Olympics, hopes to bounce back and re-open next week.

Regatta officially sunk

Hamilton Island race week 2020 has been cancelled for the first time in the regatta’s 37-year history.

The decision not to proceed as scheduled with the August event was made on Thursday after the Queensland government had declared heightened COVID-19 border entry travel restrictions.

It was a “tough decision”, a spokesman for the Oatley family advised.

They’ve got through adversity before, including the collapse of Ansett Airlines, which was the longtime race sponsors following its 1984 inaugural event.

Old timers recall going into the final race of the first event saw Silver Shamrock skippered by Breakfast Creek hotelier Peter Cavill sharing first place with Sydney-based Admiral’s Cup yacht Too Impetuous, skippered by Graeme Lambert. But the winner was West Australian sloop Hitchhiker, skippered by Noel Robins.

The Oatley family, of Rosemount Estate and Southcorp wine fame, assumed private control of the north Queensland island in 2013, when it delisted the holding company from the Australian Securities Exchange.