Goddesses line up for title of most excellent

Goddesses line up for excellent title

Will the real goddess of wisdom please stand up? Naming your fund manager after the ancient Greek personification of excellence is such a good idea there are two contenders laying claim to the moniker.

In the blue corner is mining veteran Hugh Morgan’s resources fund operator Arete Capital Partners.

And in the red corner comes mid-cap fundie Arete Investment Partners, billed as “the first female-led Australian boutique”, it was founded last year by former Wilson HTM head of research Jacqueline Fernley and former Northcape Capital manager Kelli Meagher.

Is Oz big enough for both?

7-Eleven sidestep

The deputy chairman of embattled convenience store chain 7-Eleven, Michael Smith, has given up another board seat — but apparently stepping down as a director of listed car dealer Automotive Holdings Group yesterday has nothing to do with the wages scandal.

It follows Smith’s decision to step aside as chairman of company director’s union AICD until former competition tsar Allan Fels finishes a review.

Smith is said to have been mulling stepping down from AHG since April, after realising he could trouser more than $2.5 million from the sale of iiNet to elusive billionaire David Teoh’s TPG. That’s a lot of dusk-to-dawn shifts down the Sev.

Gudinski v Doogie

Someone who really likes old TV show Doogie Howser, MD, has a $1.4m beef with music moguls the Gudinski family over failed dance music group Future.

The Mushroom group, run by veteran music industry figure Michael Gudinski and his son Matt, bought the teetering doof empire in late 2013 in a complex deal involving a mystery lady called Maria Papadimitriou.

Sadly, it wasn’t enough to save the Future Music and Summadayze festivals, which Mushroom canned after bad 2014 and 2015 showings.

This month, Global Investment Holdings, run by Papadimitrou, took Victorian Supreme Court action against Future Music, alleging it had defaulted on a $1.4m loan agreed to in October last year.

Mushroom says Global was a “minor investor” in the 2014 and 2015 festivals and denies liability.

But who really sits behind Global? Papadimitrou is director, but its shares belong to Profit Sky Properties, care of a Singapore address. There’s no such company in Singapore, but there is one in Hong Kong. It’s in turn owned by a company called Doogie Howser, giving an address in the Seychelles — which is where the trail goes cold. Some say Global is somehow connected to former Future boss Jason Ayoubi, but he isn’t saying. “I am sure all of the particulars will be on the public record soon enough,” he said.

Adara moonlighting

It turns out it wasn’t just investment banking bigwigs like UBS’s Guy Fowler and Deutsche Bank’s Steven Skala who got on board with Audette Exel’s charity effort Adara when it launched this year.

Corporate watchdog Greg Medcraft also played a part, giving Adara a waiver from financial service licensing rules so that its panel of bankers could do their bit pro bono.

Proceeds from IB work go to Exel’s Adara Development charity, which concentrates on improving health and education in remote Uganda and Nepal.

The problem was that Adara’s panel — which also includes Ilana Atlas, David Gonski, and Matthew Grounds — have day jobs and moonlighting is normally forbidden. “From Greg Medcraft down their team worked incredibly hard to find a structure that would work,” Exel said. Funding charity is all the rage at the top of town — there’s also Geoff Wilson’s Future Generation fund, where investors include Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest.

ASIC gone to the dogs

After the 2013 election, to appear simpatico to the Tony Abbott government, ASIC dubbed its dusty regulatory reports an exciting “decisions to cut red tape” — but its latest reveals it has stiffened rules covering, of all things, the dishlickers. ASIC is nominally in charge of greyhound racing syndicates, but has previously let the dogs’ state regulators look after it.

But with an inquiry into the scandal-ridden industry yesterday hearing that up to 90 per cent of trainers use live bait to train dogs, ASIC now doubts the ability of the regulators to do their jobs and in March quietly revoked their power to license syndicates.

[e-mail]
[e-mail]