It’s calculators at 10 paces in PwC duel

The world’s eyes might be on the Democratic presidential primaries, but closer to home there’s an impending vote featuring a narrowing field to replace outgoing PricewaterhouseCoopers boss Luke Sayers.

The spread of candidates to take over from Sayers, who finishes the second of his four-year terms on June 30, has just been whittled to two final contenders to run the $2.6bn-a-year professional services partnership in Australia.

Margin Call hears that going head to head in a final vote of the 600 or so of the firm’s partners is Sydney-based chief operating officer Sean Gregory, who’s originally from Britain but has been in Oz with the firm for close to two decades.

Gregory is up against Brisbane-based colleague Tom Seymour, who is managing partner of the firm’s financial advisory, tax, legal, private client, deals, infrastructure and urban renewal practices.

Unlike last week’s wildly dysfunctional Iowa caucuses, PwC runs a blind electronic ballot, where each partner’s vote carries equal weight regardless of their status in the partnership.

The highly democratic bunch (a deduction of accountants? a tax haven of accountants? a bore of accountants?) is set to anoint its new fearless leader between now and early March.

May the best man win.

Threadbare jeans

The recently retired Jeanswest CEO Mark Daynes, who quietly resigned as a company director of Jeanswest Corporation in December after 42 years in the fashion industry, is owed $120,000 after the denim fashion retailer collapsed last month.

But that’s not the biggest staff entitlement.

About $2.6m is being sought by the 1000 employees of Howsea Ltd, its Hong Kong-based owners.

Wilkin Fon, the local low-key director who turns 70 next month, is owed $240,000. Half of that is long-service leave, as he’s been working tirelessly at the South Yarra headquarters for nearly three decades.

Gympie Central’s Jeanswest store

The Ivanhoe-based Fon, who came to Australia in the early 1990s from Hong Kong, has been on the Victorian Board of the Australian China Business Council since 2005.

He’s also served on the Museums Board of Victoria since 2012, where the most significant fashion items are from the iconic Prue Acton collection.

Sales declined 20 per cent in financial year 2019 to $24m and $12m EBITDA losses.

The biggest loser in the ­Jeanswest collapse is HSBC, which is owed over $11m, albeit as a secured creditor, followed by Howsea, which bought the company for a reported $41m in 2017.

There’s $1m owed to the ATO.

Around $161,000 was borrowed from Bank of Queensland’s cashflow finance division, which is being claimed back by BOQ.

The many retail landlords from across Australia, including Scentre Group, Perron Investments and Lendlease, have lodged claims over unpaid rent, having previously faced pressure to lower their asking rents.

Peter Gothard and James Stewart from KPMG noted there was a weaker-than-expected trade period over Christmas with related parties deciding to cease funding the losses.

The latest documentation shows some clothing deliveries had been held up overseas, including shipments of stock from Bangladesh and China being withheld by the freight forwarder.

Jeanswest was founded by notable 1980s Perth entrepreneur Alister Norwood, who sold out to the former Pacific Dunlop director Peter Volk and his Chinese partners, who’d bought then-ailing fashion outfit from Western Equity in 1990.

Putting the hat around

It was a family affair when colourful billionaire Alex Waislitz gathered his nearest and dearest at James Packer’s Crown casino in Melbourne last night to shake the tin for his favourite Israeli charity, Save a Child’s Heart.

Fresh from his Waislitz Family Foundation donating $1m to bushfire victims, the Thorney Investments founder leveraged his network to support SACH, a non-political and non-religious group working to improve the quality of paediatric cardiac care for children in developing nations.

A who’s who shelled out $15,000 for a table at the bash at Crown’s rooftop Aviary event space.

Waislitz himself sold 30 of the 35 tables overall.

Rebekah Behbahani, the mother of Waislitz’s two-month-old baby daughter Storm, was there.

Margin Call hears Waislitz has welcomed his fourth child with open arms in between his recent bouts of international travel, including skiing in Aspen and watching the Super Bowl LIV in Miami.

Storm is little sister to Waislitz’s three children with former wife Heloise Pratt, the daughter of late box king Richard Pratt.

Happily, we hear Storm will soon also have a new cousin, with Behbahani’s Real Housewives of Melbourne sister Venus Behbahani pregnant and due later this year.

Waislitz persuaded Antony “The Cat” Catalano, with whom he owns Australian Community Media, to donate two nights at his Byron Bay Raes on Wategos luxury beachfront hotel for the charity auction.

Also along were Waislitz’s sister Hedy and his brother Avee, as well as Shelly Hod Moyal, a founder of Waislitz’s favourite all-female Israeli venture capital investment firm iAngels.

Smorgon scion David Smorgon and other members of the family clan who work in Jack and Robert Smorgon’s Escor Group were aboard, along with Arnold Bloch Leibler partner Jeremy Leibler and Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce chairman Leon Kempler.

Postie purge

What was it about the Stanhope era that head postie Christine Holgate had been so keen to clear the decks of?

Earlier this week we told you about the pre-Christmas exit of Post company secretary and before that head of board and shareholder liaison Erin Kelly, whose departure came not long after the exec had returned from maternity leave.

Ouch.

The post-Stanhope purge contInues at Australia Post

But Kelly wasn’t alone in the purge enacted in the wake of chairman John Stanhope’s exit towards the end of last year.

Now Margin Calls hears of the demise of the former chairman’s executive assistant at the government business, Lucy Grillo, a 48-year veteran of the organisation.

We are told that Grillo, who started at Post when she was 17 and was at Post’s Queen Street office at the time of the 1987 Queen Street massacre, was so fond of her job that she was the only member of the executive staff to sport the corporate uniform every day.

Post says Grillo was offered an alternative gig, but we hear it was nothing particularly appealing to the corporate veteran. Out with the old.