Grollos in pole position for strip club Showgirls Bar 20

Cartoon: Peter Nicholson.

The Grollo family are firming as likely buyers of the building housing Melbourne strip club Showgirls Bar 20, moving them one step closer to the long-held dream of redeveloping the podium of their Rialto office tower into a shopping centre.

Showgirls is owned by Planet Platinum, a company until recently controlled by John Trimble, the nephew of late drug lord “Aussie” Bob Trimbole.

Thanks to Greg Medcraft’s ASIC, PP is now in the hands of provisional liquidator John Lindholm of Ferrier Hodgson, who is charged with figuring out how to get the most he can for long-suffering minority shareholders.

Locals reckon selling to the Grollos would reap about $15 million — something that Lindholm will no doubt carefully consider as he finalises a report due with the Victorian Supreme Court next Monday.

Hopefully Lindholm will also tell the court how much he’s spent, which should make interesting reading. The man he replaced, Gideon Rathner, who was appointed by Trimble, spent $1200 on new dancing poles — and more than $120,000 of company money on lawyers in a failed month-long bid to keep the gig.

If the Grollos nab Showgirls, the last remaining holdout will be the nearby Inflation nightclub building, owned by King Street identity John Iwaniuk, who’s said to want at least $10m. Everything else on the block already belongs to the Grollos.

End note for shindigs

Embattled music mogul Steve “Pav” Pavlovic has said sayonara to soirees with his supermodel squeeze sitting on a baby grand in the back yard.

Last week he flogged off his multi-million-dollar pad, a stone’s throw from Bondi Beach, to publicist Sophie Landa, the daughter of late NSW attorney-general Paul Landa.

Billed by agents as possessing “designer interiors” that “capture the essence of barefoot glamour”, the house was last year the scene of a dinner party thrown by the vodka-shilling Ciroc Collective that was Instagrammed for posterity by Pav with a pic of his missus, model and Vogue blogger Tanja Gacic, perched on the aforesaid white baby grand.

The CC mob, which includes Icebergs chef Maurice Terzini and Ksubi types George Gorrow and Dan Single, seem to have gone quiet of late — but then, how can you top getting a vodka brand to pay for a dinner party with mates? Just as Pav immortalised the high times on social media, he’s captured the lows, last week posting a pic of some lemons from the backyard tree hashtagged “nothinglastsforever”.

Margin Call is sure the sour taste is shared by artists from Pav’s Modular label, allegedly owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid royalties.

Don’t hold your breath

There was no mingling with alleged arsonists and assault accused at Melbourne County Court yesterday for Fairfax exec Antony Catalano, who was a no-show at a brief hearing in his appeal against a drink-driving conviction. Catalano was in Byron Bay, where he co-owns celeb haunt Rae’s on Wategos, leaving his ex-commando barrister, Peter Billings, to deal with judge Mark Taft.

Earlier this month, a magistrate revoked Catalano’s driving licence after the Domain boss blew 0.08 in Victoria’s beachside Sorrento last year.

The summer season in the fabbo millionaire’s playground will be all but over by the time Catalano’s appeal is heard — it’s been set down for two days starting February 4 next year.

Asked by a surprised Taft why a drink-drive appeal would take so long, Billings said he was considering challenging the operation of the breath-testing machine and might need to call an expert witness.

Jacob hard at work

James Packer may be flat out squiring Mariah Carey around the Mediterranean and living next door to Bibi Netanyahu, but over at Ellerston Capital his former consigliore Ashok Jacob is hard at work. The fund manager, which these days is mostly owned by Jacob and other staff with Packer retaining only a minority interest, has just upsized the latest fund it’s touting by a cool $20m.

Ellerston Asian Investments, which plans to punt on listed and unlisted stocks under the guidance of former George Soros manager Mary Manning, will now take up to $120m. It’s charging an outperformance fee of 15 per cent — 2.5 percentage points less than the similar impost over at IOOF chairman Roger Sexton’s Beston Global Food Company listing on Friday.

[e-mail]

christine.lacy@theaustralian. com.au