Hutchinson up high as Vocation wallows

VOCATION’s share price may have fallen off a cliff, but chief executive Mark Hutchinson hasn’t — although he has bought himself a nice perch atop one.

Property records show that in September Hutchinson settled on the purchase of a five-bedroom house just down the road from Shelly Beach in Manly, in Sydney’s north.

He paid $7.25 million to motorcycle champion Wayne Gardner for the home, which has three levels (Gardner added one just three years ago, according to a Manly Daily report on the sale in April).

And while Vocation shareholders are gazing into the abyss the Hutchinsons can gaze into Cabbage Tree Bay — the property boasts uninterrupted ocean views. It also features a full bar, suitable for drowning sorrows, and a pool on the back deck that looks like it would be lovely to plunge into.

Speaking of drowning, sorrow and plunges, since Monday, when Vocation reversed months of denials and finally admitted to woes in its Victorian arm, company stock has shed an astonishing two thirds of its value.

Defamation battle

ONE of Australia’s high-profile defamation lawyers, Stuart Gibson, “repeatedly and viciously threatened to destroy” the legal career and livelihood of a law student, it has been alleged.

Gibson, who has represented Hollywood royalty including Demi Moore and Russell Crowe, is acting for PR guru Charlie Goldsmith in a defamation lawsuit against the student, Raph Brous, and radio station Triple R (Margin Call, October 23).

While promoting his band, Teenage Mothers, during a late-night interview, Brous allegedly defamed Goldsmith by calling him a “knob jockey”, an “A1 turd burglar” and an “Aryan ubermench”.

Brous last week filed his defence with the Victorian Supreme Court. In it, he accuses Gibson of threatening to dob him in to legal practitioner bodies to stop him being admitted as a solicitor or barrister. Under rules governing solicitors in Victoria, they must not threaten “disciplinary proceedings against the other person in default of the person’s satisfying a concurrent civil liability to the practitioner’s client”.

Brous also accuses Gibson of “intentionally misleading the court” by claiming that no apology had been offered, when one had. But the most astonishing allegation is that in a concerns notice, sent in August before the lawsuit was lodged, Gibson insulted Brous as “an underachieving, attention-seeking twit”.

Gibson told Margin Call the defence was embarrassing. “I’m in the process of preparing a reply to Mr Brous’s notice of defence, which will be filed with the court next week,” he said.

A tailwind to Sabah

LITTLE has been seen or heard of former Leighton Holdings chief executive Hamish Tyrwhitt since he was unceremoniously dumped by the Spanish Armada that descended on Leighton’s Sydney head office back in March.

Tyrwhitt and his numbers man Peter Gregg were given their marching orders by Spanish supremo and now Leighton boss Marcelino Fernandez Verdes, but received $24 million worth of payouts and untested equity awards between them to soften the blow.

Now Tyrwhitt has turned his hand to sailing, and been mightily successful at it. Word is that he bought a 60-foot cruiser from none other than Gregg shortly after they both left Leighton, and has been sailing it up the east coast of Australia and beyond, crossing the Coral Sea and Gulf of Carpentaria to eventually land at Kota Kinabalu in the Malaysian state of Sabah.

Tyrwhitt is no stranger to Sabah. His wife Farinah hails from the exotic area, and he was riding a bike in Kota Kinabalu when he got the shock call to be Leighton chief executive in August 2011.

A sight to behold

IT’S not true that Wesfarmers’ boss Richard Goyder can’t always get what he wants. But he can’t get no satisfaction from brown sugar, honky tonk women or tumbling dice. Instead, at the Stones concert in Perth on Wednesday night, the highlight was NAB chairman Michael Chaney in a band T-shirt. “That is a sight to behold,” Goyder said.