Final nail in Masters hardware coffin

Illustration: Rod Clement.

Finally — unbelievably — Woolies chair Gordon Cairns has slammed shut the book on the retailer’s disastrous home improvement business Masters.

A tripartite deal will net Woolies about $1.5 billion in gross proceeds — not even close to half the cash the company has lost on the botched DIY project.

Woolworths chairman Gordon Cairns. Picture: Brett Costello.

There are some familiar faces throwing big cash on the table to help new Woolies boss Brad Banducci clear the aisles for a fresh start.

Former Melbourne-born UBS banker David Di Pilla — now a resident of Bellevue Hill’s Kambala Road — has gathered associates, friends and family to form the Home Consortium Group that will take Masters’ real estate assets and obligations.

Retail billionaire Morry Fraid and Chemist Warehouse millionaire Jack Gance anchor Di Pilla’s acquisitive clique. It’s rounded out by his own group of investors in the already existing Aurrum Group, which runs aged-care facilities.

Di Pilla is married to a scion of the Salteri family and manages their millions via Olbia Pty Ltd. His parents-in-law Alex and Mary Shaw are Aurrum investors, as are UBS bankers Matthew Grounds and Robbie Vanderzeil, along with what ­appears to be Di Pilla’s brother Stephen Di Pilla.

For UBS Asia boss Grounds, the property deal, added to his aged care investments, is ­another knot in the rock star’s ­increasingly tangled position in corporate Australia. But for now the Swiss don’t seem to mind.

Pepe Le Pew’s big deal

Since the start of last week David Di Pilla has been finalising the structure of his deal, creating the Home Investment Consortium company with $50 million in paid-up capital. Then on Tuesday he created the Home Investment Lease Company so that the deal can be done with Woolies and — they hope — Lowe’s.

It all smells sweet for David Di Pilla. Picture: Peter Clark.

It all smells sweet for Di Pilla, who back in his days at the Swiss investment bank UBS, was known as “Pepe Le Pew”, the French black-and-white striped skunk from the Looney Tunes cartoons.

Cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew also has distinct white stripes on his black hair.

That was because of Di Pilla’s two distinct white stripes on his otherwise black hair and his thoroughly assured — if sometimes disputed — opinion of his own investment banking charms. We’re told by close associates his scent had nothing to do with it.

Biting hand that feeds

Chris Bowen’s well-regarded former chief of staff Brett Gale represented the National Press Club’s major sponsor, Westpac, yesterday at Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s address.

Opposition leader Bill Shorten addresses the National Press Club. Picture: Ray Strange.

With most of the Labor caucus in the crowd — as well as a bored-looking Gareth Evans — Shorten doubled down on his opposition to a tax cut for the big four banks (a “$7.4bn taxpayer bonus”) and the need for a banking royal commission (“there’s been far too many scandals followed by only empty apologies”) — and all with the logo of Australia’s oldest bank stamped around the room.

Westpac’s roughly $1m annual sponsorship also gets the bank’s boss Brian Hartzer a plum table at next week’s Midwinter Ball.

The catering better be good.

Position vacant

Well, better strike David Murray’s name off the shortlist to replace Catherine Livingstone as the next president of the Business Council of Australia after his eye-raising echoing of Victorian Liberal Party president Michael Kroger.

Chief Executive Women president Diane Smith-Gander. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui.

So if not Murray — who now sits on the prestigious board of the Indoor Skydive Australia Group — who will BCA chief executive Jennifer Westacott and her board put forward to replace Livingstone at the business lobby’s November AGM?

Wesfarmers’ poor result yesterday underlined why Richard Goyder — who also sits on the BCA board — has made it known he is not to be considered.

One possible candidate who has been notably raising her profile is Diane Smith-Gander.

Her role as president of Chief Executive Women has provided some welcome softening after the harsh scrutiny the former McKinsey partner earned when she chaired Broadspectrum (nee Transfield and now owned by Spaniards), which ran Australia’s offshore detention centres.

The Manus Island experience makes her battle-hardened, if divisive.

But making her even less likely is her directorship on the Wesfarmers board, which is chaired by former BCA president Michael Chaney. Not surprisingly, the BCA has been criticised for looking like the play thing of the Perth-headquartered conglomerate. It’s a stretch to see its members ordaining another member of its board.

A must read

Back to Westpac where Diane Smith-Gander once worked with a desk decorated with a set of mounted bull’s testicles.

Olivia Newton-John and former Westpac boss David Morgan were in the 1966 film Funny Things Happen Down Under.

We learned that Gail Kelly’s predecessor as the bank’s CEO, David Morgan, 69, is writing a book about his working life. A British journalist is helping the London-based Morgan on the task.

It joins the book Princeton history major Brian Hartzer — the current boss of Australia’s oldest bank — is overseeing for the bank’s 200th birthday next April. The book won’t just be about Morgan’s time as a banker. He’s more interesting than that.

Like CBA’s boss Ian Narev, Morgan was a child actor. He even worked with the pre-Grease Olivia Newton-John in the 1966 film Funny Things Happen Down Under.

The overachiever was sporty too. In 1972, he was picked to play for Richmond in the Australian Football League.

But then a career in economic policy got in the way and took him to the Treasury Department where he was a department secretary in its 1980s reforming heyday. Along the way he met his now wife, Hawke-Keating minister Ros Kelly.

Morgan then ran Westpac from 1999 to 2008, and is now managing director at private equity firm JC Flowers & Co.

So plenty of material to work with for Morgan’s follow-up to his 1977 page-turner
Over-Taxation by Inflation.

Air rage

Terrible to see Paul Howes’ flight on John Borghetti’s Virgin Australia was delayed by two hours yesterday — even if his choice of airline seemed to be tempting fate.

Paul Howes’ Virgin flight was delayed by two hours.

Howes, the former national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, tweeted a complaint about the Virgin delay from Adelaide, tagging it “#worldsworstairline”.

Howes is of course married to Olivia Wirth, an executive at Alan Joyce’s Qantas, who on the same day released a record $1.53bn profit.

Some good aviation news to balance the bad in the Howes-Wirth household.

Chillering out

Our Olympic athletes jetted in to Sydney yesterday — on sponsor airline Qantas — with $56,000-a-year chef de mission Kitty Chiller leading the charge.

Our Olympic athletes landed in Sydney yesterday. Picture: AFP Photo/Saeed Khan.

President of the Australian Olympic Committee and International Olympic Committee vice-president John Coates — paid about $700,000 a year — wasn’t on the same plane.

He’s still overseas recovering from what he said was the most difficult Games ever.

Coates is paid more than some Olympic sports get a year in total funding from the John Wiley-driven Australian Sports Commission.

According to the ASC, that’s more than archery (which gets $600,800), judo ($667,800), table tennis ($253,000), weightlifting ($362,500), badminton ($450,000) and modern pentathlon, which despite bringing home gold via Chloe Esposito, received only $25,000 in the past year.

For the sake of comparison, the chair of Wesfarmers Michael Chaney gets about $700,000 a year (Coates money), but that role oversees $62bn in revenue at the diversified conglomerate.