Charity charade of Adriana Benhamou Weiss revealed; Virgin’s dispute with ex-flight attendant

Adriana Benhamou Weiss pictured in 2015 at The Gold Dinner. Picture: Chloe Paul

Fresh developments in the curious case of Adriana Benhamou Weiss, the socialite and interior design consultant currently on hiatus in France ahead of facing Australian Securities & Investment Commission charges of falsifying records at her company, Benhamou Designs.

Margin Call has already reported on the list of creditors and high-net-wealth individuals accusing her of all manner of sins, from allegedly delivering poor quality furniture to disappearing with large amounts of money.

A lesser known tale concerns her departure from the esteemed Gold Dinner charity committee, a volunteer board responsible for co-ordinating the most exclusive charity gala in the country in the service of sick children.

Margin Call has learned Benhamou Weiss was inducted to this rarefied club by Nikki McCullagh, the wife of Pacific Equity Partners founder Paul McCullagh, who co-chaired the committee in 2015.

Its membership included Chrissy Comino, wife of property investor Victor Comino, media executive Jayne Ferguson, and jewellery designer Alina Barlow, wife of Sydney FC chairman Scott Barlow.

But the committee is not just some roundtable of pretty faces; they’re expected to lure major-league donors to the annual gala, which is scheduled to be held once again on May 18, just shy of the upcoming election, with tickets priced at $2000 a stub.

We’re told everything was all milk and honey at the committee and for Benhamou Weiss until, that is, planning works started for the 2015 Gold Dinner.

Top of the wishlist was a decorative piece for the venue at Sydney’s Town Hall: an ­extremely rare, hand-brushed panoramic wallpaper of Captain Cook’s voyages to the South Seas, as imagined by artist Joseph Dufour, the rights to which are exclusively held by French company Zuber and printed to order from multiple woodblocks.

Behamou Weiss allegedly assured the committee that she could procure the rights to reproduce the wallpaper using her impeccable interior design connections in Paris.

“It was a big ask to get them to provide the copyright – they’d never done it in their history,” a person with knowledge of the matter told Margin Call. “So what she was professing to have was potentially more important to the event than just being able to sell seats.”

Not only did those efforts fall flat (the committee, regardless, secured the rights independently), but Benhamou Weiss also allegedly told fellow committee members to provide her with two tables that she would fill with donors.

This, too, yielded little fruit, with delay after delay leading to a paucity of RSVPs and monumental frustration from McCullagh and Cosimo.

“It became clear that she wasn’t everything that she was suggesting,” said the same source.

A spokeswoman for the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation confirmed the interior designer held committee tenure between 2013 and 2015 but was unable to comment on the circumstances of her departure. Benhamou Weiss was contacted for comment.

We’re informed that she eventually stopped coming to the committee meetings.

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Virgin dispute

Hot on the heels of bullying and harassment claims against Virgin Australia boss Jayne Hrdlicka comes a fresh claim against the private equity-owned airline – this time by a flight attendant sacked two days before Christmas.

Documents were filed in the Federal Circuit Court late on Wednesday by former hostie Donna Waterhouse, who had worked at the Bain Capital-controlled Virgin since September 2019 but was sacked in December last year.

Virgin Australia CEO Jayne Hrdlicka. Picture: Sarah Marshall

Waterhouse is disputing her dismissal under the Fair Work Act and is seeking unspecified compensation and a pecuniary penalty from Virgin.

As revealed in The Australian earlier this month, Virgin’s former chief pilot Michael Fitzgerald has also taken the company to court, alleging he was bullied and threatened while working at the airline.

He argues the business violated his workplace rights by terminating his contract while he was on extended sick leave. He also alleges his seven-month extended absence was due to Hrdlicka, a former Qantas executive, engaging in workplace bullying.

In the latest claim against the airline, Waterhouse alleges her woes began on a Sydney to Melbourne flight on November 24 last year with cabin manager Adam Joyce.

On the flight and subsequent flights the same day, Waterhouse alleges Joyce needlessly “officiously” and “closely” watched her work, was variously “incommunicative” and yelled at her in front of fellow crew and passengers, addressed her “rudely and aggressively” and sought to “humiliate” her.

Without good reason, Waterhouse alleges, Joyce pushed her towards passengers as they were leaving their seats when the plane landed and yelled in a loud voice: “Get in there!”

All this, Waterhouse claims, was a pretence to have her “stood down”.

Waterhouse complained to cabin crew leaders about her treatment by Joyce. Instead of taking action, they ordered her to undertake training sessions, which she did.

But Waterhouse reckons the courses were “designed to ensure the applicant failed” so that Virgin could then dismiss her, which the airline did on December 23. She was not told what she needed to do to pass the course or keep her job, and one of her instructors told her she was doing very well – before giving her a fail mark, leading to her dismissal, Waterhouse claims.

The dispute was first dealt with by the Fair Work Commission, but its failure to resolve the matter will see Waterhouse’s claim back before the courts on May 13.

A Virgin spokeswoman said Waterhouse was stood down and then dismissed while still in her probationary period “due to her inability to pass compulsory safety critical examinations”.

“She was given the opportunity to respond to Virgin Australia’s concerns,” she said.

“Despite being encouraged to do so, Ms Waterhouse did not make any formal complaints in relation to the conduct of other team members as has been alleged in the application while employed at Virgin Australia.”

Adriana Benhamou Weiss

Jayne Hrdlicka