Jansen ally withdraws as cannabis kerfuffle continues

Dr Ben Jansen is less than pleased with the reporting of his attempt to return to Vitura.

Attempts to spill the board at listed medicinal cannabis play Vitura Health are already falling apart barely days after they were announced to the market.

Margin Call reported on these developments at Vitura this week, noting that former chief medical officer Benjamin Jansen had put himself up as a director along with former chair Shane Tanner and two individuals of a lesser known quantity, Nathan Hight and Mariota Smutz.

Rewind one year and Jansen was sitting pretty as a director at Vitura, known then as Cronos. Jansen would still be holding on to that position if he hadn’t resigned under questionable circumstances, later alleged by the company to be a “repeated pattern of inappropriate behaviour, lack of judgment and poor performance”.

It’s Jansen who is ostensibly leading this coup against the board. He’s roped in Tanner, the old chair seeking a comeback, along with Hight and Smutz who appear to be no more than a couple of mates helping out with the cause – well, at least one of them was.

Smutz is an old university chum living in the tax haven of Jersey. His nomination was announced on Friday. Looks like there’s been a bit of activity over in Jersey, because Margin Call can now report that he’s withdrawing from the Vitura process entirely, and in record time, too.

As Smutz told us: “Due to a shift in my workload and professional obligations, I won’t be able to dedicate the necessary time and effort required for the role. As such, I have withdrawn my nomination as a director of Vitura Health. I have notified parties and thanked them for this opportunity.”

Talk about sudden! Incidentally, Smutz’s decision came one day after questions were put to him by this column regarding his qualifications and intentions. These were simple enough – Margin Call just wanted him to outline his experience in the field of medicinal cannabis, if any, and whether he intended to fulfil his directorial duties from the comfort of the British Isles.

Similar questions were put to Hight, a businessman whose affiliation to Jensen appears to be through New Zealand’s Whangamata Surf Lifesaving Club. No response was provided and it would seem that he’s still sticking with the nomination process – at least for the moment.

Jansen didn’t respond to questions regarding Smutz’s withdrawal but he’s been busy on LinkedIn complaining about Margin Call’s coverage of the matter and hyping the “caliber of the nominations” and their “extensive industry expertise”. Ah, is he talking about his former university classmate Smutz who’s living in the Channel Islands and wants nothing to do with this business anymore? Or is he referring to Hight, the bloke he knows from the surf club?

Amusing, too, when Jansen uses such grandiloquent language to talk up his nomination, saying it was put forward by “Vitura’s primary shareholder and fellow founding owner, Elizabeth Jansen” and that he and the others “genuinely value the honour of these nominations and our opportunity to serve the esteemed shareholders of Vitura Health”.

Ah, the honour of these nominations? They were put up by his wife, and this nomination is very much in the family’s interest. The Stanford Investment Trust owns 21.3 per cent of the company and Elizabeth is its trustee, giving her a platform to initiate a spill. And she’s got form!

She supported a similar destabilisation campaign last year to try help Jansen get back into his old job.

Abandoning that move in the weeks leading up to the AGM, she released a statement saying her intention, and supposedly that of her husband, would now be to take a “a break from the business” to spend “more time with our family”.

And didn’t that get old fast.

Home truths

Here’s a weird quirk of Perth real estate history worth unravelling in the context of Gina Rinehart’s raid on Liontown Resources, chaired by lithium billionaire Tim Goyder.

Turns out Goyder and wife Linda bought their family home from Hancock Prospecting in 1987, the deal conducted for $640,000.

That’s was when Lang Hancock helmed the company. The sale documents even refer to Goyder as a “prospector”, which he sort of still is, albeit in a much grander league.

Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart. Picture; Liam Kidston

Three decades later and the Goyders are still living there, in Mosman Park, but not for too much longer now that they’ve spent $17m on a heritage estate in Peppermint Grove.

Meanwhile, Rinehart has spent $1bn buying up just shy of 15 per cent of Goyder’s company, almost as much as he owns himself. This all while global lithium giant Albemarle conducts the due diligence on a $6.6bn takeover bid.