Jon Adgemis set to lose luxury yacht as CBA floats sale
Flailing pub baron Jon Adgemis probably has bigger things on his mind than the loss of his lifestyle trappings, but if you’re in the market for a luxury yacht then the Commonwealth Bank has a deal waiting for you.
Adgemis is approaching a Monday deadline to hand over $400,000 as a first instalment to his $7.7m rescue plan for Public Lifestyle Management (PLM), a key pillar of his former Public Hospitality Group of pubs and hotels. He has until late March to cough up another $600,000, with the remainder to come in the form of convertible notes backed by Archibald Capital, to vest at the end of July.
This explains why his 95-foot luxury yacht, Hiilani, is now on the market after being put up for sale by the CBA-appointed receivers.
Curiously, no mention of the would-be hotel baron’s name among the ad copy for the boat on the website of Flagship International Yacht Brokers, which is otherwise keen to trumpet the credentials and taste of Hiilani’s previous owners.
Hollywood legend Shirley Temple Black rates a mention, as do Sydney bar owners Adam Abrams and Julian Tobias, along with Melbourne businessman Chris Reeve. Adgemis isn’t named but is instead referred to as “a Sydney publican”. Better that than “failed Sydney publican”, to be fair, although we’ll see what happens if the first round of rescue cash doesn’t lob on Monday.
No price listed for Hiilani and receivers Grant Thornton declined to spell out the size of Adgemis’s debt to CBA in their last public report on the affairs of The Yacht Pty Ltd, the company that owned the vessel.
But for those in the market for a Sydney Harbour runabout, the yacht boasts “pedigree, prestige, and boundless potential”, according to Flagship International boss Marley Cutbush.
That includes space to host up to 45 partygoers and four staterooms to sleep nine favoured guests. Expressions of interest close on February 10, by which time Adgemis will probably have a better idea of the fate of the rest of his business empire.
Creditors approved the outline of the rescue deal for Public Lifestyle Management in December, and a deed of company arrangement was signed two weeks ago.
If completed, it will effectively return five hotels to Adgemis’s control, including the Bondi South Hotel, the Exchange in Balmain, the Claridge, the Bayswater and the Empire Hotel. NE
Road to nowhere
You’ve heard of the gift that keeps on giving, but what about Allan Fels, the venerated former competition chief? He and his sidekick David Cousins are both gifts to government that keep on taking.
Both men are being paid, again, to advise the NSW government on toll road reform, a startling development, especially when one recalls that Premier Chris Minns and Roads Minister John Graham publicly rejected the recommendations of their 18-month inquiry into the NSW tolling system (not all of them, but the two biggest ones were scratched immediately) only a few months ago.
Graham’s office confirmed that Cousins and Fels remain on daily payment rates (not including travel costs) to advise on the tolling reform mess that Minns and his ministers are trying to fix. Meanwhile, our field-assets at 52 Martin Place tell us that Fels and Cousins should receive plenty of marmalade to cover their toast for this work – as much as $150,000 for a set of opinions that have already once been rejected.
We can only sigh at the memory of Minns insisting, in opposition, that he would cut the government’s pathological addiction to spending money on consultants. Last year he even set up a DOGE-like “unit” within the Premier’s Department to, in his words, “rebuild in-house capability and only use external consultants when it’s actually needed”.
Fels and Cousins, between them, have already received $1.7m to give advice that no one important appears to have taken seriously. For that sum, they earned more than any in-house bureaucrat; more than Peter Duncan, Secretary of the Premier’s Department, who’s on $657,750, and more than Treasury Secretary Michael Coutts-Trotter, who receives $626,300. Nevermind that their tolling recommendations went down like a light bulb to a concrete floor, Fels, in his wisdom, then decided to give a stunning television interview to the ABC in which he trashed the leading bureaucrats working with him on the inquiry and claimed they blocked key aspects of his work.
No bridges left to burn after that little stunt.
And yet Graham is still championing Fels like he’s some sort of sage, telling us on Wednesday that he (Fels) is the “best in the business” at seeking a “path to a fairer system” for hard-done taxpayers.
“The 380-page Fels-Cousins Toll Review provided that path and their strategic advice to Government in 2025 will leverage that work as we seek the best pricing outcome for motorists,” Graham said.
The minister must have plum forgotten that Fels was very awkwardly queried by Treasury officials last year over his billing of taxpayers for spurious services rendered. This included charging the government for a speech given to an infrastructure summit that had nothing to do with the work of the tolling inquiry.
And Treasury brows were similarly raised after Fels, as part of his work on the inquiry, chose to stay two nights at a luxury five-star hotel, Capella Sydney, at a cost of $1550, when doing so was “anomalous”, as one official wrote, with Fels’s usual choice of accommodation.
Minns is right to seek reductions to the use of overpaid external consultants. After all, what’s the point of keeping departments filled with specialists if their expertise is never tapped?
Perhaps the DOGE unit might give this odd little gravy-train arrangement with Fels and Cousins another look-see. YB
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