Jamie Durie loses his shirt, twice

Illustration: Rod Clement.

It seems stripper-turned-gardener Jamie Durie turned to an unlikely source of funds after losing his shirt: former Macquarie Group boss Bill Moss.

Details of the $500,000 loan from the veteran financier have emerged amid the dirt ­unearthed during a torrid lawsuit brought against Durie by his former business manager, Mike Curnow.

Last week Curnow won most of the NSW Supreme Court case, more than $750,000 in management fees, but ­damages have yet to be worked out.

In a decision handed down on Friday, Justice Michael Slattery said Moss-helmed Boston Financial Services loaned Durie the money in July 2010. It was repayable in 18 months, together with interest at a not-at-all loan-shark-like rate of 10 per cent a year.

As security, Durie gave Moss a second mortgage — after ANZ — over his whale-shaped spread at Sydney’s Avalon Beach (complete with sea views, pool and Balinese-themed interior).

By the time the loan was due in January 2012, Durie owed Moss between $600,000 and $700,000.

According to the judge, Boston put Durie under “considerable pressure” to pay up.

“Mr Durie appreciated that Mr Moss was a ‘no-nonsense type of guy’ for whom ‘business is business’,” Slattery said.

Jamie Durie

Durie hired David Kenney from Hall Chadwick to help him restructure his ailing business.

Kenney wrote a script for Durie to follow in a begging call to Moss — and Durie, ­always the showbiz trouper, followed it.

Helpfully reproduced in full by the judge, it is somewhat excruciating.

“I know I have also made some bad decisions about buying assets, like Avalon … I’ve been caught short and embarrassed,” it reads. “Another problem I recognise is that I haven’t had someone in my ear telling me commercially to pull my reins in.”

On staff, “we have had some surplus people on a bit of a gravy train and that is stopping now”.

It appears to have worked — in May 2012, Boston gave Durie more time to pay up — in return, of course, for more security over Durie’s assets.

Upstairs, downstairs

Ian Narev’s CBA is keeping quality company as it fights government agency Austrac, which has accused it of more than 53,000 counts of failing to report money laundering (including a handful of occasions on which the bank is alleged to have likely been used to finance terrorism).

As the bank’s counsel John Sheahan SC, duked it out with the government’s silk, Simon White SC, at a Federal Court directions hearing in Sydney yesterday, another contest between hard-done-by company and an overzealous regulator was taking place nearby. Two floors down, Calvin Holdings, a company associated with the family of corrupt former NSW Labor pollie Eddie Obeid, was taking on Chris Jordan’s Australian Taxation Office over an $8.6 million tax bill.

The company, which runs a family trust, was joined in the action by no fewer than 11 other members of Obeid’s family.

CBA execs on notice

At least the Obeids seem to stick together. The cracks are showing at CBA, where chairwoman Catherine Livingstone has shown longer-serving directors the door, as foreshadowed by Margin Call last week. Former retailer Launa Inman is gone, as is 11-year veteran and erotic novelist Harrison Young. Former AMP CEO Andrew Mohl has been given a year’s reprieve so he can help the bank sell off its scandal-ridden life insurance division CommInsure.

In is NSW Treasury Secretary Rob Whitfield, a former Westpac head of insto banking who left that gig two years ago after being passed over for the top job in favour of Brian Hartzer.

As CBA continues its search for a replacement for Narev, other execs associated with the outgoing CEO must surely be sharpening their resumes.

Among those whose services are less likely to be required by any new boss is David Cohen, who has been chief risk officer since last year but before that spent eight years as general counsel. Also nervous would be Annabel Spring, who has spent six years in charge of wealth management, which includes the troubled financial advice and life insurance divisions.

Apparently there’s a job going at NSW Treasury.

Banging the drum

Retail billionaire and horseflesh fancier Gerry Harvey, head of the directors’ union and Nestle director Elizabeth Proust, top lawyer Jeremy Leibler: all have been banging the drum about the evil influence of proxy advisers upon Australia’s institutional shareholders, who apparently can’t decide anything for themselves.

It’s a campaign that has agitated the highest levels of Greg Medcra f t’s ASIC, which in May held a roundtable meeting attended by, among others, Proust’s Australian Institute of Company Directors, the ASX, company secretaries’ club the Governance Institute, and proxy advisers CGI Glass Lewis, ISS and Ownership Matters.

In a letter sent a fortnight ago, ASIC commissioner John Price reminded attendees of the jolly and warned the proxy houses he’d be watching their recommendations — particularly any thumbs down to sitting directors — in the upcoming AGM season.

(By the by, he also ruled out a code of conduct for the industry and told companies to be clearer in their missives to the market.)

But the thesis that the proxy people make puppets of shareholders looks to have been disproved over the weekend by embattled amusement park operator Ardent Leisure, which has been locked in battle with corporate raider Gary Weiss.

CGI Glass Lewis recommended against appointing both Weiss and his nominee Brad Richmond because each lacked “relevant experience and/or perspective”, while Ownership Matters said no to Weiss.

The stoush was due to come to a head at a meeting yesterday but on the weekend, Ardent’s board, led by George Venardos, folded to overwhelming shareholder pressure and appointed both to the board.

Apparently shareholders can make their own minds up.

Chips off old block

The entrepreneurial sons of Fairfax execs Greg Hywood and Antony ‘The Cat’ Catalano look to be evolving their own property market play, Apartment Developments.

Seems the twenty-something offspring Jordan Catalano and Tom Hywood have big plans for the enterprise, which no doubt Fairfax is watching with interest as they tap the online market for off-the-plan apartment ads.

The pair have just moved out of the Cat’s Beaconsfield Parade St Kilda home and into funky commercial premises in Windsor, which will go some way towards dispelling any lingering talk of conflicts of interest with dad’s Domain.

All the pair have to think about now is their exit strategy from the dotcom enterprise — maybe their dads could help with that.