Helen Rosamond AVO adds to NAB fraud case intrigue

Illustration: Rod Clement.

Helen Rosamond, the Sydney businesswoman at the heart of the multi-million-dollar fraud case that has engulfed Andrew Thorburn’s National Australia Bank, has sought an apprehended violence order against her former husband and business partner Geoff Rosamond.

News of the unsavoury personal development comes as police yesterday morning raided the luxury home of Thorburn’s former chief of staff, Rosemary Rogers, in Williamstown, west of Melbourne, seizing computers and other material relating to the high-profile bank fraud investigation.

The police raid came on the one-year anniversary of Margin Call’s revelation that Rogers had left NAB (after an uncomfortable one-on-one meeting with Thorburn), ending her nine-year stint in the all-seeing, all-knowing chief-of-staff role for Thorburn and his predecessor as the bank’s chief executive, Cameron Clyne.

It’s the police’s second televised raid, following their exploration earlier this year of the offices of the British-born Helen Rosamond’s Human Group in North Sydney.

Human Group organised about $113 million worth of fancy event and luxury travel services for NAB’s executive class for several years.

Police are investigating whether kickbacks were paid by Human Group to bank staff to secure inflated contracts with NAB.

A year into the investigation, no charges have been made.

Margin Call is not suggesting the fraud allegations are true, only that they are being investigated.

The Rosamonds were former business partners in Human Group, with Geoff Rosamond leaving as a director in August 2015.

In February this year, he then exited as a shareholder with his former wife taking up his single share in the company.

She remains the sole director of the troubled entity.

Local court records show NSW Police on behalf of Helen Rosamond have applied for an apprehended violence order against Geoff Rosamond, with the matter listed for a mention at Downing Centre next Wednesday.

NSW Police did not respond to Margin Call’s inquiries about the matter and there was no answer at the office of Human Group, where the telephone appeared to be off the hook.

The company’s website could not be accessed.

Rogers and her husband Anthony Rogers purchased the $3.8m Williamstown property that police raided yesterday at the end of last year.

It was the most recent of four properties the couple had amassed during NAB’s Clyne and Thorburn era.

Two other Rogers property purchases date to the Thorburn era: a Williamstown apartment bought last year for $701,000 and an apartment in the Melbourne inner-city suburb of Richmond bought in mid-2015 for $735,000.

Their coastal property — a place in Bellbrae for which they paid just under $1m — was bought at the end of the Clyne era.

The Australian last week revealed that the NSW Crime Commission had instructed NAB to freeze Rogers’ bank accounts.

Title documents relating to her portfolio of real estate reveal no change to any holdings in recent months.

Meanwhile, Rosamond, who appears to still be renting in Potts Point, settled on the sale of her six-bedroom Mosman trophy home for $6.57m in March, weeks before NSW Police’s first raid.

The next Kroger

Tomorrow evening almost 160 Victorian Liberal Party members will vote for a president to replace Michael Kroger, who eventually agreed to stand down after the Liberals’ humiliating November state election defeat.

Three candidates have put their hands up: Robert Clark, a rule-loving old man who lost his state seat of Box Hill in the November Danslide, Marcia Coleman, a nice old lady who chairs organ donation agency Australians Donate, and Ian Quirk, an eccentric long-time critic of Kroger’s Napoleonic second reign.

Clark — the 61-year-old, socially conservative attorney-general in the short-lived Baillieu-Napthine government — is the favourite and has support of an array of Kroger’s many enemies.

Even Clark’s supporters admit he’s not exactly a dream candidate. Still, many in the wounded division say they are resigned to competence — or at least something resembling it.

Margin Call has learned cabinet minister Kelly O’Dwyer made that clear at the Victorian federal Liberal members crisis meeting in Canberra a fortnight ago, in the gloomy shadow of the party’s dreadful state election.

That’s the meeting with Josh Frydenberg and the rest at which Kelly famously said many voters thought the Liberals were “homophobic, anti-women, climate-change deniers”.

O’Dwyer wouldn’t comment on the private meeting, but a source present told Margin Call that she also used the forum to outline three, similarly pithy, not-negotiables for the next Liberal president.

They needed to have a pulse. They needed to not be a lunatic. And they needed to want the Liberal Party to win.

What a trifecta!

State Hansard records that Clark has had his homophobic moments. Look at his cringe-worthy comments in 1995 on the equal opportunity bill.

But his supporters — who we gather include O’Dwyer, a majority of the Canberra caucus and most of his remaining former state members — believe he ticks those three boxes.

And the most attractive quality for many of them: Kroger and his supporters are backing Coleman.

Knives out

Bloodlust being what it is, some Victorian Liberals — including some of their most senior members in Canberra — want state director Nick Demiris gone before PM Scott Morrison goes to the polls.

That would be an expensive decision.

We understand Demiris, only one year in the thankless job, is on a five-year contract.

Any early parting of ways with the former Kevin Andrews staffer would eat right into the $37m the Liberals just made selling their headquarters to Rolex.