Former Star CFO helps set up deal; Twiggy’s aerial pursuits offset his oceanic carbon ambitions

Angus Aitken has described the Star agreement as ‘the stupidest ­potential deal I have seen in my 25 years in broking’. Picture: John Feder

Star Entertainment crawled its head out of the noose on Friday with a stunning deal to sell half its stake in Brisbane’s Queen’s Wharf casino complex for a paltry sum of $53m, if only to stave off a slow and miserable corporate death.

Stockbroker Angus Aitken attacked the move as sheer ­lunacy in a client note on Tuesday, calling it “the stupidest ­potential deal I have seen in my 25 years in broking”. We don’t blame him at all.

The buyers aren’t lunatics, of course, nor are they stupid. They were named as Hong Kong’s Far East Consortium and Chow Tai Fook Enterprises, both of which already own the other half of the Queen’s Wharf precinct. For chump change, they stand to grab a further slice worth $1bn to Star.

There’s a word for this sort of unbelievable fortune. In the game of Mahjong, they call it scooping the moon from the bottom of the sea. Aitken put it more colourfully: “To me it’s like a homeless guy walks into an art museum in New York and offers you a packet of chewing gum in return for a Picasso, that is the extent of the value transfer here.”

Star Entertainment board chair Anne Ward.

Former Star CFO Harry Theodore.

Star’s five NEDs own too few shares in the casino company to claim any serious skin in this game. At their current price, board chair Anne Ward has a personal holding worth $11,000; Peter Hodgson’s stake is worth $10,450; Michael Issenberg’s is a pathetic $3533; Deborah Page’s is $6271 and Toni Thornton’s share is $18,700. The place could burn into an ash heap tomorrow and none of them would know or care. To borrow again from Aitken: “How can people with so little wealth at risk casually transfer $1bn of value to HK billionaires? Madness.”

And what no one seems to know about this stunning transaction is that Star’s former chief financial officer, Harry Theodore, was engaged on it the whole time, quietly working with the bankers at Flagstaff Partners who were advising the Hong Kong contingent on the deal. We presume he’s been assisting with valuations, although neither Theodore nor Flagstaff would comment on Tuesday.

Arguably there’s no one more familiar with the Queen’s Wharf development – or Star Entertainment – than Theodore. He was Star’s head of strategy in 2015 when the casino business – then known as Echo Entertainment Group – announced delivery of the Queen’s Wharf project. Four years later he was appointed CFO before quitting in 2022.

We also doubt Flagstaff or the Hong Kong partners paid much attention to his very recent inconveniences with the corporate regulator. In late February he was ordered to pay a $60,000 penalty and disqualified from managing corporations for a period of nine months – that was after he admitted to several breach of his duties during his time as a Star executive.

High-flying carbon

Climate crusader Andrew Forrest graced these pages on Monday talking up a boat that he modified in Singapore, a very special vessel powered by four-stroke engines, two of which take diesel. The other two engines are powered by a mix of ammonia and diesel, which apparently should help with greenhouse gas emissions.

So said the Fortescue Metals chairman from London once the 75m ship Green Pioneer sailed into the docklands over the weekend, Forrest boasting the ship “embodies the innovative spirit, courage and leadership that is taking Fortescue to real zero carbon emissions by 2030”.

Andrew Forrest’s 75n-long vessel Green Pioneer. Picture: Jacquelin Magnay

But is he including all the filthy carbon being personally expelled in the course of his frequent air travel?

We clocked Forrest’s Bombardier Global 7500 burning up many barrels of jet fuel ahead of his ­arrival at London’s Biggin Hill Airfield, a favoured landing pad for ­oligarchs.

The same day that Green Pioneer cruised into London, Twiggy was boarding his jet in the western Saharan city of Dahkla, in Morocco, where we know he has many interests, only some of them being renewable energy.

Prior to landing, the plane took a pit stop in the capital Rabat, but that was after a visit to the US for BMO’s annual metals, mining and critical minerals conference, in Florida, where Fortescue CEO Dino Otranto gave a spiel that touched on the company’s “values”.

He named two of them as “frugality” and “humility”, none of which come to mind whenever Twiggy humble-brags about single-handedly saving the planet, or orders London’s cabs and billboards be painted slime green for his cause.

Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest. Picture: AFP

Let’s not even think about the carbon miles Twiggy’s been doing, but we were idle enough to track his path backwards from Florida to Beja, Portugal, then to Lisbon, back to London, then to Munich, New York, and back to Australia.

And that’s just for the month of February. Whatever carbon his ammonia-powered boat is saving in the shipping lanes of the Atlantic, you have to wonder how much is being offset by Twiggy’s rapid pace of flight.

A spokeswoman told us the plane uses “sustainable aviation fuel wherever possible” and travel is calculated “from A to B in the most time efficient way”. She said: “To influence decisions on what we care about in the world, you have to be at the table.”

True. And yet, imagine if there were another cheap and carbonless way of placing oneself at the centre of important conversations … like a Zoom call.