The fortnight-long 2024 Australian Open was the first time that Jayne Hrdlicka as chair of Tennis Australia hosted the grand slam tournament without a Melbourne base to call home.
With just days until Christmas, the Virgin Australia boss finally found a buyer for her Hawthorn mansion Crossakiel after repeated campaigns to offload the historic home over the past two years had been unsuccessful.
The divestment followed her move to Brisbane to run Virgin after joining as boss in November 2020 after it was purchased out of administration by Bain Capital. The American-born exec later purchased an expansive contemporary home in the inner Brissie suburb of Teneriffe. Proving her passion for the sport she stewards, Hrdlicka’s home in Melbourne came complete with a tennis court.
Hrdlicka had wanted as much as $19m for the Kooyongkoot Rd home, but she ultimately sold for $16.11m to Wendy Carter, the wife of NAB senior exec Paul Carter, with the bank helping out with a mortgage to facilitate the purchase.
Carter, now NAB’s group head of strategy, returned to work at the Ross McEwan-led institution after a deviation across the ditch to work for five years at the Bank of New Zealand.
In 2018, just after he left NAB, Carter spent a couple of days in Kenneth Hayne’s banking royal commission witness box giving evidence as NAB’s former head of superannuation. Until 2017 he’d spent almost a decade working there and gave evidence about the bank’s controversial fee structure on super products.
Carter has a strong corporate pedigree. His father is Colin Carter, who established a management consultancy company that became the Australian practice of BCG.
The senior Carter went on to become a Wesfarmers director and was also president of the Geelong Football Club, before handing over the reins to now Medibank chair Craig Drummond.
Drummond was at Hrdlicka’s affair at Rod Laver arena on Sunday night too.
Melbourne really is a small town.
No windfall for Marr
Unless he buys shares like any other punter, alas, now former executive at Virgin Australia David Marr won’t be in on the ground floor when it comes time for the Bain Capital-controlled airline to refloat on the exchange – all going well – later this year.
Marr, who had been Virgin’s chief development officer before exiting last November, had been the exec charged with strategising and preparing the company for its IPO.
Like several of his colleagues and Bain operatives, Marr had been allocated shares in Virgin Australia Holdings that are being held in a corporate trust pending a listing.
Those shares would have been converted at a set price into ordinary shares ahead of the float, potentially netting holders a lucrative windfall. But not Marr, who was previously CFO to Jayne Hrdlicka as boss.
Margin Call understands he was one of the holders of a large parcel of more than 320,000 Virgin shares that were bought back by the company for a mere $1 each at around the time Marr left. The shares were subsequently cancelled.
If Marr is still of the faith and wants in as the float approaches, he’ll now just have to call his broker.
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