Flight fight turbulence continues; Origin nixer’s adviser gets its Keating’s worth
Our report earlier in the week concerning former investment banker turned non-executive director Charles Kiefel and an altercation earlier this month on a Qantas flight from Singapore to Sydney won’t rest.
Further information on the dust-up that Kiefel had with a crew member – Margin Call is reliably informed it was one of the pilots – is filtering in from sources including from the Australian Federal Police.
“A man travelling on an international flight from Singapore was arrested on arrival at Sydney Airport on 16 November 2023,” an AFP spokesman confirmed.
“AFP officers boarded the aircraft after receiving reports from flight crew members of an alleged disturbance.”
Kiefel, 68, is chair of Principals Funds Management and was once an executive at Ord Minnett and ANZ Investment Bank. In June 2019 he was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to Australia-US relations and to philanthropy. He is also a director of the Clean Energy Regulator.
“The man was later released from police custody,” the AFP spokesman said, but added that “inquiries into the matter are continuing”.
So the whole affair may have some way to run yet.
Kiefel, who we hear was travelling in business class, is believed to have been worked up about the repeated flight delays he had experienced, among other things.
Several of his fellow passengers have contacted us to recount their version of events on the flight, with a relatively sleepless night reportedly had by many seated near the cranky Kiefel on the overnight flight.
Keating on Origin
Investment bank Lazard looks to be getting its money’s worth out of having former Australian prime minister Paul Keating on its books.
Lazard is advising AustralianSuper on the controversial Brookfield-EIG offer for Origin Energy, which will go to a shareholder vote next Monday.
All sides are mobilising towards the finish line, with Keating, the father of big super in this country, penning a lengthy opinion piece published on Thursday in Nine’s Australian Financial Review on why shareholders should reject the Brookfield proposal.
Lazard’s client, AustralianSuper, has about 17 per cent of Origin and is against the bid. The fund is chaired by Don Russell, a former principal adviser to Keating when he was treasurer.
Keating reckons Origin is effectively a public utility that is privately owned and that assets of Origin’s quality “should not be sold to private equity … with the sole aim of delivering unconscionable profits to equity fund investors”.
Brookfield, he says, is “just another opportunist private equity fund trying to take suckers for a ride”.
“The markets in Australia should tell Brookfield to find some other bunnies for its get-rich-quick schemes.”
Readers had to scroll through at least seven screens of Keating’s arguments before being told he’s on Lazard's’ payroll.
They might as well have just placed an ad.
New chapter for book
It must have seemed like such a coup at the time.
Former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins had become a national figure, she’d spoken at the Womens’ March 4 Justice rally in Canberra in mid March 2021 and was receiving enormous support across the country following her account of allegedly being raped at Parliament House.
Higgins’ relationship with veteran journalist Lisa Wilkinson was blossoming, with her author/journalist husband Peter FitzSimons helping Higgins to negotiate a lucrative book deal.
A $325,000 contract with Penguin Random House was signed on March 25, 2021, with Higgins getting $108,333 upfront and the balance to come once she’d delivered her final manuscript.
Negotiations towards the deal were revealed exclusively by Margin Call at the time, as well as Higgins’ move to set up her own company, Brittany Higgins Pty Ltd, to execute the deal.
But on Thursday in the Federal Court, as her alleged rapist Bruce Lehrmann continued his defamation action against Network 10 and Wilkinson, we heard Higgins admit that elements of a rough draft emailed by her to the publisher were now considered by the former media adviser to be incorrect.
Where to stock such a tome, on the fiction or nonfiction shelves of bookstores?
Higgins admitted the book was now “tentatively on hold, but then again I may not want to do this ever again”.
And then as Lehrmann’s barrister Steve Whybrow SC continued to grill Higgins over sections of her draft, the twenty-something threw her hands in the air and declared: “I will donate the 200 thousand whatever to charity, every cent, I don’t care about the money, I don’t care about it.”
She’s clearly still pissed that the draft ever saw the light of day: “I thought it was going to be kept private, but that’s fine.”
But what does German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House, do about the $100,000-plus advance that Higgins has likely already spent if the project is never revived? Yet more legal action? We shall see.