James Packer and Jodhi Meares see the Upside of new business

Illustration: Rod Clement

Gaming billionaire James Packer has emerged as a major investor in former wife Jodhi Meares’s burgeoning fashion business, The Upside Corporation.

Packer’s private Consolidated Press Holdings has taken a 20 per cent stake in Meares’s activewear enterprise, which was established in 2014.

His good friend and Hollywood film producer Arnon Milchan also invested in the former bikini model’s business, matching Packer with a 20 per cent stake.

The sell-down leaves newly remarried Meares, 45, with a 60 per cent share in her fashion baby.

Merimbula-born Meares was Packer’s first wife. The pair married in 1999 and divorced three years later, but have remained close friends.

Early this year she married aspiring Melbourne photographer Nicholas Tsindos, 28, after a whirlwind romance, while Packer is engaged to pop star Mariah Carey.

After the breakdown of Meares’s engagement to rocker Jon Stevens mid-last year, she enjoyed time on Packer’s yacht Arctic P in the Mediterranean. Carey was also on board.

Then in August last year, Meares accompanied the billionaire to a fundraising dinner in Sydney, with the pair raising eyebrows when they left the function together.

Packer, who was not at the Crown resorts board meeting in Perth yesterday and is believed to be in Los Angeles, has appointed his CPH executive in charge of brands, Sam McKay, to Meares’s board of directors.

James Packer wearing Upside gear.

Overnight his fiance Carey was also in LA, enjoying dinner with her manager Stella Bulochnikov at Packer’s Nobu restaurant in Malibu.

Milchan has appointed his Los Angeles-based son Yariv Milchan, 47, to take care of his family’s interest, which is held through Milchan’s Monarchy Enterprises Holdings, an arm of the movie producer’s New Regency vehicle.

Also joining Meares’s Upside board is her long-time financial adviser Mark Calvetti, who has assisted the model from the time of her marriage to Packer. Calvetti brokered the undisclosed sale of her first fashion business, bikini outfit Tigerlily, to Billabong.

Meares’s close friend and retail consultant David Bush, a former director of David Jones womenswear, has also joined The Upside board.

Casual affair

With majority investor James Packer halfway around the world, the first sign that his Crown execs may have been nervous about yesterday’s AGM in Perth came when photographers were barred from proceedings and instead corralled into a small roped-off section outside.

But chairman Robert Rankin had little to be worried about, fielding just one shareholder question on this week’s detention of 18 employees in China.

Director and former AFL boss Andrew Demetriou seemed to have other things on his mind, spending much of the meeting studying his iPad.

Should we be surprised when the Crown meeting coincides with the final, frenetic hour of Aussie rules’ annual trade period?

Fellow board member and former Qantas chief Geoff Dixon applied a new level of casual to the affair, opting to go tieless, leaving both his top and his second button undone for good measure.

Despite the China situation, the most pressing issue for the 50-odd punters in attendance was why shareholders were not receiving generous discounts on Crown’s luxury domestic hotel rooms.

Room for a view

The Australian summer means weekends away at designer retreats for our most handsomely remunerated citizens.

One of best-paid of the lot is Chris Hadley, the executive chairman of private equity darling Quadrant.

The view from Hadley’s weekender

The evidence is there at his latest purchase at Palm Beach — the beach retreat of choice for much of Sydney’s financial set.

Back in 2013 the British-born Hadley, 57, and his wife Susan bought a stunning Sunrise Road pad in Palm Beach for $10.6 million.

And it turns out the outlay didn’t end there. The Hadleys have since paid another $3.65m for an undeveloped block and its driveway, which sits adjacent to their six-bedroom Susan Rothwell-designed place (with internal lift, wine cellar, swimming pool and dual walk-in wardrobes).

The Hadleys’ latest Palm Beach purchase has nothing to do with expansion plans but rather a multi-million-dollar insurance program for the Master of the Northern Beaches’ views. Take a look at them running — uninterrupted — across Barrenjoey Peninsula, Palm Beach and Lion Island to see why.

It’s the sort of purchase you can make when you own a 47.5 per cent stake in one of Australia’s most successful private equity firms.

Hadley founded his private equity shop in 1996 with George Penklis, who has since left the firm — in opaque circumstances — but retains a 47.5 per cent stake.

The other 5 per cent of Quadrant is owned by finance director Andrew Gilman.

The loyal Abbott

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has a picked up a new gig as patron of his beloved Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, of which he was inaugural national executive director in the early 90s.

The new role — just added to his register of interests — is a good reminder that Abbott and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull disagree on a lot more than crossbench negotiations over gun legislation.

The position formally reunites the member for Warringah with David Flint, who is the monarchists’ tireless national convener and an ardent Abbott booster in The Spectator Australia.

On the other side of the constitutional divide, the hunt continues for a Coalition member to co-chair a parliamentary group to support the Peter FitzSimons-chaired Australian Republican Movement.

Despite the federal Coalition’s wealth of republicans, and the fact that their boss is the nation’s best known figure in the movement and that billionaire James Packer has kicked in $250,000 to the cause, a replacement is still to be found for Joe Hockey.

The then treasurer Hockey was appointed to the role less than three weeks before he was torn down in the Turnbull ascension, a sequence of events that seems to have spooked his republican colleagues.

More than a year later, Labor senator Katy Gallagher is still waiting to be joined by a co-chair. Can’t be long now.

John’s hoarding call

As well as basking in this week’s flybuys deal between his airline and Coles, Virgin Australia boss John Borghetti revealed the extent of his hoarding at a Melbourne luncheon yesterday.

Borghetti told the audience, which included food king Guy Grossi, that he keeps all of his boarding passes. He now has two bags of them.

“Now I’m really annoyed we are going digital,’’ Borghetti said, joking that he was refusing to use the airline’s swank mobile boarding passes.

“I deliberately ask my PA to book me on paper.”