For Ramsay, all rules went against the grain

Cartoon: Peter Nicholson.

Eighteen-month gaps between board meetings, “no rules” and a former Wallaby wandering around the board room — welcome to life at Paul Ramsay’s business empire.

Details of what it was like working for the late healthcare billionaire emerged yesterday in the Victorian Supreme Court, where the chairman of Ramsay’s listed Ramsay Health Care, Michael Siddle, was giving evidence about an investment by the private arm of the empire, Paul Ramsay Holdings, in ill-fated grain trading company LGL Commodities (Margin Call, July 16).

LGL was run by Michael Long, or “Agent Proton”, back when he sold wheat to the Saddam Hussein regime for AWB, his brother Mark, farmer Tim Griffith and PRH CFO Simon Freeman.

It collapsed in June last year owing creditors including the ANZ $12 million and now liquidators Andrew Yeo and Gess Rambaldi are picking over the bones in court examinations.

Siddle said the idea of getting into LGL came from PRH’s fund manager, former Wallabies No 8 Tim Gavin, and day-to-day responsibility for looking after it belonged to Freeman.

He was also a member of the PRH board, which he said met “irregularly, when Ramsay was available. He wasn’t one for lots of meetings,” Siddle explained.

Asked why there was no mention of LGL in PRH’s board minutes between November 2012 and May last year, he said “there were no board meetings” in that period.

Siddle was asked whether LGL fit within PRH’s investment mandate. “We didn’t have mandates. Mr Ramsay would dictate mandates as he went,” he answered.

And asked whether tipping an extra $5m into the struggling LGL would have been a significant move, he said: “We had billion-dollar exposures. There were no rules.”

Perhaps more corporates should try making it up as they go along: when Ramsay died last year, he’d made a fortune of some $3 billion, the vast bulk of which he dedicated to charity.

Goldies face grilling

Thanks to some Aussie fund managers, there’s no getting away from the “one shitty deal” that came to define the worst excesses of Goldman Sachs during the GFC for the Wall Street bank’s CFO Harvey Schwartz and director David Viniar.

Investors burned when Basis Capital’s Alpha Yield lost out on Goldies’ toxic CDOs known as Timberlake and Point Pleasant (famously described in the US Senate as “one shitty deal”) have been waiting for a hearing in a New York courtroom for a long time. Basis went under in 2008 and the lawsuit, for $67m in losses plus a cool $1bn punitive damages, was filed in the New York Supreme Court in 2011.

Basis, which these days is in the hands of former Mallesons lawyer Nick Reeves, has been slowly pushing the case along. But last month it scored a breakthrough when Judge Jeffrey Oing ruled that both Schwartz and Viniar’s exalted rank didn’t excuse them from giving evidence about a deal in which both appear to have been closely involved.

Lawyers for Basis may now grill both under oath for five hours each, and a trial could be held towards the middle or end of next year in front of a jury of half a dozen Manhattanites.

Cat’s Father’s Day gift

Congrats to Fairfax exec Antony Catalano, who experienced Father’s Day in every sense of the word with the birth of son Jack. Its the Cat’s eighth child and his third with third wife Stefanie, whom the Domain boss married in a max glam ceremony in 2012.

But who’ll drive the brood around? Catalano is due in court in February to appeal against a drink-driving conviction slapped last month by a magistrate who also suspended his licence for 16 months.

Moore’s pitch to yoof

The only thing better than a frosty beverage is a 90s-style JoinedUpWord, so how clever of right-leaning think tank the Centre for Independent Studies to combine the two and throw in a bonus Nick Moore to boot.

Macquarie Group’s head teller is the first of the “titans of Australian business, politics, and academia” the CIS promises for its ThinkDrinks “series of networking events for young professionals”, and will be holding forth at Sydney’s Aurora Hotel after work on the 24th.

No doubt Moore will inspire the yoof with the tale of how he clawed his way from the wilds of Melbourne’s Mordialloc to the top ranks of the millionaire’s factory.

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