Janine Lowy purges Quora account of posts about former husband Peter Lowy and their marriage

Janine and Peter Lowy with Shirley and Frank Lowy in the US in 2002.

The notoriously private Lowy family received some unexpected magnification this week when it emerged that Peter Lowy’s ex-wife Janine had spent the better part of 12 months spilling the beans online about the breakdown of their marriage.

Together for three decades, criticism of Peter was strewn across question-and-answer website Quora, where Janine outlined the circumstances of the divorce and alleged that her husband abandoned the family after being busted “having an ­affair”.

“The image that he had cultivated for so long – a loving husband and father – was shattered,” she wrote.

An otherwise low-key figure, Peter’s only real moment of oddball notoriety came in 2018 when, two years after divorcing Janine, he reinvented himself as “Peter Drysdale” and hit the LA club scene with a stand-up routine. The son of billionaire Westfield co-founder Sir Frank Lowy, he was 60 at the time of launching this second act and, if one is to believe his ex, effectively paid for people to sit in the audience.

“He was never a funny guy but he could buy his own gigs,” Janine said in one post. “Many of his (unfunny jokes) were about our marriage and divorce. Many of my friends in his paid audiences were heard to laugh hysterically as if the break-up of a family was the most hilarious thing in the world.”

Screen grab of one of Janine Lowy's posts.

His career ended, she claimed, because he broke the “cardinal rule” of comedians: that comedy should never be a therapy session of “devaluing your partner”, adding that “making fun at other people’s expense is not funny”. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is liable to disagree on that point, as would anyone who’s enjoyed Ricky Gervais’s monologues at the Golden Globes or Prince Harry’s book Spare.

The couple divorced in 2016, with Lowy having since remarried American businesswoman and ageless blonde Sandra Barros Lowy.

But as steadfast as Janine’s take might have been on the untidy demise of their relationship, it appears she’s no longer committed to keeping the posts online. As of Wednesday morning a large chunk had been purged from Quora, with her account renamed to that of a pseudonym.

The only content spared from the cull was a smattering of unrelated musings about Princess Diana and some rather incisive analysis of the royal family. Margin Call’s attempts to contact Peter and Janine, who reside in North America, have been unsuccessful.

Bubs advice

The unremarkable website of corporate advisory firm Kidder Williams greets visitors with a prominent image of a cow made out of papier-mache in a moment of solemn-looking copulation.

The main picture greeting visitors to the website of corporate advisory Kidder Williams.

That may strike some as confusing, but as a metaphor it’s a handy one for the transactions KW is often engaged to advise upon in the corporate hinterland. And that brings us to its managing director, David Williams, who’s been drafted in by Bubs Australia to assist with the provision of strategic advice, as reported by our friends at the Fin Review this week.

Williams might run KW but he also happens to be the chair of medical company Polynovo, where he sits on the board alongside fellow director Bruce Rathie, the husband of Bubs chair Katrina Rathie. Small world, eh? And it neatly explains how KW might have ended up with a Polynovo contract last year, too.

A far bigger and long-term client of KW is Bega Cheese, which had a try some years ago at manufacturing infant formula of the kind perfected by Bubs, doing so alongside vitamins company Blackmores. That ended in 2017 owing to flat sales and other pitfalls.

David Williams. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

Katrina Rathie.

Williams is a dealmaker, a cutthroat – all about the transaction, not the growth. Maybe that’s why the market bounced so hard to the news of his appointment on Wednesday, with Bubs shares closing 31 per cent higher at 19c. The scent of a sale in the air? Then again, the announcement of an optimistic full-year guidance couldn’t have hurt, either.

The perceivable conflict(s) here is obvious, but more to the point, one doesn’t need a striking image of a cow being rogered to get a sense that there might be a deal in the offing. To remove any doubt, our money’s on Bega to play the bull.

Killen’s payout

Pretty much one year to the day since controversial AACo boss Hugh Killen walked out of the agribusiness and it’s only now we learn that he wasn’t exactly kissed off with a golden goodbye.

Killen departed on June 21, announcing his resignation the same day as he filed for the turnstiles. AACo chairman Donald McGauchie gave no reason for Killen’s exit or any detail of his entitlements. Thankfully, the company’s annual report for March 2023 sheds light on the particulars of his severance package.

Hugh Killen.

Looks like Killen received $223,000-odd for about three months of work leading up to his exit, along with a benefit of just $293,677, which looks like a special payment in lieu of notice. Tellingly, directors chose not to award Killen any of the 87,000-odd performance rights that he held, the exercise of which was left to the board’s discretion; since then he’s sold 452,042 of the ordinary shares he held when he finished up. Had he sold last year he would have cashed out with a smidgen over $1m; these days the holding would be worth $680,000.

The months preceding Killen’s resignation included reports he’d been flying about on AACo’s private plane to his property in southeast NSW. This while the company was getting JobKeeper subsidies.

He was also queried by the board about a rumoured affair with a staff member, as reported by Margin Call, and there was that small matter of being outed as the donor of a company plane to a charity auction held by his alma mater, The King’s School.

All in the distant past, of course. It seems Killen is getting his career groove back, having just taken the chairmanship at Climate Asset Management, a joint venture between HSBC and climate advisory outfit Pollination, to whom he’s been a senior adviser out of London in recent months.