Prominent stockbroker Angus Aitken is still passionately backing Andrew Forrest and hitching his wagon to Fortescue Metals Group, slapping buy orders on the company even during these seemingly dark hours.
Aitken is a long-term supporter of Twiggy, one of the many pals hand picked to attend that 20-year celebration of FMG thrown in the Pilbara last month. Not as well known is that Aitken purchased a $13m penthouse apartment in the Quay Grande building for the billionaire in 2020 (where Forrest already owned a pile) and discreetly transferred the title into his name on a later occasion.
So, yes, Aitken’s a backer and he’s punching on the Twig’s behalf following that boardroom clearout of CEO Fiona Hick, CFO Catherine Morris, and the exit of former deputy RBA governor Guy Debelle.
Amid a share price swoon and a barrage of sell recommendations, Aitken dispatched two client notes in his amusingly coarse style, deeming FMG stock a standout buy and telling everyone to hoard shares before they jack up beyond $30.
“The founder has not gone mad,” Aitken wrote on Monday.
“People rate Elon Musk as a genius who honestly does seem loopy and yet a bloke (Forrest) who has taken this from zero to $61bn and is a lower-cost producer of iron ore than BHP/Rio you want to bet against? That seems strange to me.”
Aitken backed up this rhetoric on Wednesday, strongly suggesting the bevy of recent executive resignations, and beyond, were dead weight who didn’t so much as walk but were sacked. “Maybe one of these days someone in the media will work out 99 per cent of the people leaving FMG or the private interests are being fired,” he said. “They (Fortescue) are just clearing out lemons.”
Same mining job
Not a single mining employee seems to feature in the attack ads launched against Labor’s Same Job, Same Pay legislation this week, an oddity considering the industry’s alarmism about the effect of the reforms.
The advertisements were shown to an audience attending Minerals Week on Wednesday at Canberra’s Hyatt Hotel, where Liberal Opposition leader and keynote speaker Peter Dutton was introduced by Roy Hill chief executive Gerhardt Veldsman, who’s obviously no fan of the legislation, or a certain German philosopher.
“Don’t let a small group of people out of Victoria – that have never set foot on a mine site – decide what is good for you,” he told the room. “This red tape looks a lot like the colour, and the same red, that’s on the front page of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.”
Not to cavil on that, but the Penguin Classic doesn’t seem to have any red on the cover at all.
Anyway, the advertisements were played. Plenty of farm workers picking heads of lettuce on a misty morning. There’s a woman fretting over her bill at the supermarket checkout and tradies stomping through worksites. But where are the mines? Where are the hewers of rock? Where is BHP chief Mike Henry shouting the words “productivity killer” into a void, as he has been for months?
Bear in mind this was a Minerals Council of Australia event and its board is practically weighed down with mining executives, including BHP president Geraldine Slattery, who’s been loud on the Same Job Same Pay legislation, and who says her company is likely to be hit hardest by the reforms.
No miners in the ads? OK. But it was the only takeaway attendees were talking about for the rest of the afternoon.
Matter of conveyance
There was never much love out of the NSW Liberal government for Property Exchange Australia, the e-conveyancing outfit known as PEXA. It’s been fighting for years against competition reform pushed by Victor Dominello, the former digital minister who’s now consulting to the Abu Dhabi government.
Hence Margin Call’s surprise at what (at first) looked like multimillion-dollar in-kind donations from PEXA to various union movements, including the CFMEU and a whopping $2.8m to the Australian Education Union. Turns out this was simply an enormous error by the unions and perhaps the Australian Electoral Commission, too.
According to the AEC, the Glenn King-run PEXA was listed for more than $4m in ‘other receipt’ donations to the unions since FY19. This is impossible, according to a company spokesman, who says PEXA never gave a dime to these entities, or provided any in-kind services.
“PEXA does not make, and never has made, donations to unions,” the spokesman said, explaining that the entries on the AEC website appeared to be the result of unremarkable property settlements, made using PEXA’s systems. Somehow these were erroneously listed by the unions on the transparency register.
Hardly PEXA’s fault, of course, and quite an accounting snafu on the part of the unions. The PEXA spokesman added: “You would have to ask the unions or the AEC why they have been declared and captured as contributions.”
Margin Call duly went to the CFMEU, which didn’t respond, and the AEC, which needed more time to investigate how this happened.
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