Michael Kroger ready for round two: get Charles Goode

Illustration: Rod Clement

Victorian Liberal president ­Michael Kroger is believed to be preparing for round two of his ­vicious legal battle with Charles Goode over the $70 million ­Cormack Foundation. And the first round hasn’t even been decided yet.

The mooted case — which Margin Call understands has been discussed by Kroger’s inner circle — would target three of the Victorian Liberals’ most distinguished servants: former Business Council of Australia president Hugh Morgan, gentlemanly stockbroker John Calvert-Jones and their fellow Melbourne Club member Goode, the former chair of ANZ.

From what we understand, the discussed legal strategy would be as vicious as it would be personal.

It would also add to the millions of dollars already spent on the unresolved battle with Cormack, the Liberals’ biggest donor.

Clearly we weren’t wrong in noting that Federal Court Justice Jonathan Beach’s impending Cormack decision on Thursday — now only five sleeps away — would be far from the end of the blue-blooded family feud.

Both Team Cormack and Team Kroger are braced for a mixed result on Thursday.

A possible outcome would have shares previously held by Morgan and Calvert-Jones given to the Liberal Party.

That would still leave a controlling 75 per cent of the shares with Goode and his fellow Cormack directors.

And it wouldn’t grant the Liberals any seats on the board.

Melbourne Club sources suggest, in such an outcome, the Liberals’ board representation on Cormack would only come about after Kroger was replaced as president.

Team Kroger has a different idea. Buoyed by Goode’s Federal Court admission of a conflict of interest between his duties as a Liberal trustee and as a Cormack director, the Kroger camp has discussed a second legal case.

Its essence: get Goode.

President Kroger is believed to have told his inner circle that winning control of Morgan and Calvert-Jones’s shares would put the Liberals in striking distance of the $70m.

But it would require a second legal case.

So while the Liberals did drop their direct case for Cormack’s assets, make no mistake — Kroger wants the lot.

He’s just trying to get the shares first.

It isn’t clear that the party would give Kroger approval to launch a second legal stoush, especially so close to Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy’s showdown in November with Labor Premier Daniel Andrews at the Victorian state election.

But, ominously for Goode, Kroger’s stonking re-election as president in April shows he is not without supporters.

Gray matters

Inspired by next week’s summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, Margin Call set off to a lecture on Thursday night by private equiteer Ben Gray, the University of Queensland’s 2018 Rodney Wylie eminent visiting fellow.

The lecture was made possible by Rodney’s son John Wylie, who back in the mid-1990s as the head of Credit Suisse First Boston hired the young Melbourne University graduate Gray and his Ormond College buddy John Knox (now the local boss of Credit Suisse).

Wylie, his wife Myriam Boisbouvier-Wylie, the Productivity Commission’s superannuation supremo Karen Chester, her husband Peter Boxall, as with Chester a distinguished mandarin, and a host of young, ambitious finance types — and Margin Call — were along for the final instalment of Gray’s three-­lecture series.

The venue was the State ­Library of Victoria, which Wylie chairs. Unfortunately, the event was run on Chatham House rules, so Margin Call is not able to relay Gray’s Thursday night talk on the international and domestic private equity scene.

Nor can we describe to our readers the pictures Gray showed of he and his two co-founders of the 101 Collins Street-headquartered private equity firm BGH Capital, Robin Bishop and Simon Harle, flying around regional America in 2017, sometimes on a plane, sometimes on a helicopter, quaffing Starbucks, in their ultimately successful quest to raise $2.6 billion for what is now Australia’s largest private equity fund.