Kiwis produce top Australian bankers

Cartoon: Peter Nicholson.

BOASTING about how good you were during your time in New Zealand is a bit like skiting about your ability to beat toddlers at chess — but that didn’t seem to stop NAB boss Andrew Thorburn yesterday.

Speaking at a Women in Banking and Finance lunch in Sydney, Thorburn talked about his 20 years in Kiwiland (he still has a Long White Cloud passport), even dropping in some Maori phrases to liven things up.

But while the Kiwis are great at rugby — and, these days, cricket — they stink at banking.

The banking sector is dominated by the Australian big four. Outside that, many of the finance companies that used to fill the gaps blew up in an epic four-year disaster between 2006 and 2010, leaving investors owed about $NZ8 million.

Indeed, New Zealand doesn’t even have a banking law — it repealed the Banking Act in 1995. This has made the country a prime target for shonks looking for a loosely regulated jurisdiction from which to run a financial services company.

There’s even a book out, The Land Without A Banking Law: How to Start a Bank With a Thousand Dollars.

Given all that, the really big surprise is that New Zealand manages to keep producing top-tier Australian bankers — in addition to Thorburn, former CBA head tellers Ralph Norris and Ian Narev both hail from the gloomy isles.

Sharing and caring?

THE speech was long on warm fuzzies and short on specifics — at least Thorburn was asked about the financial planning scandal engulfing the bank.

Admitting this was a “good question”, he proudly pointed out NAB’s MLC was the first bank-owned planning group to move from commissions to fee-for-service, way back in 2007.

Not that the man who introduced the change, Steve Tucker, got any benefit. He left in 2013 after unhappiness about the performance of the division. So much for sharing and caring.

Missing millions

CUDECO boss Wayne McCrae appears to have solved the mystery of the missing $499,999. Now all that remains to be seen is if he can solve the mystery of the missing $15m, which would prove those pesky “southern dickheads” who criticise the company wrong once and for all.

He’s also been stung by a going concern notice in the struggling company’s accounts for the half-year to the end of December, released yesterday.

The accounts show Cudeco, which is building a copper mine at Rocklands, near Cloncurry in Queensland’s northern interior, received just $1000 in income in the period.

But hang on — didn’t it say on December 1 that a Chinese buyer had paid a $US500,000 deposit on a load of test copper? So where’s that cash?

Company secretary Bruno Bamonte told Margin Call sales actually came to about $1.7m (cash), including the load to China and another lot flogged off to Glencore. This was “not considered revenue but a reimbursement of some of our mine development expenditure”.

Cudeco needs $45m to get Rocklands up and running, $30m of which is to come from Chinese investor Oceanwide. The accounts show $10m arrived after balance date and Bamonte said the other $20m “is to be paid this week”. That leaves a $15m gap — hence the note from auditor Adam Twemlow of KPMG, warning of “significant doubt” Cudeco can pay its bills.

Not that investors can act on any of this. Shares have been suspended since February 2, when Cudeco promised news of a capital raising within a couple of days. That deal fell through, and Bamonte said Cudeco is looking to finalise a replacement “as quickly as we can”.

If it can’t, Cudeco’s future looks as rocky as the red dirt that stretches out to infinity around Cloncurry.

Muller resigns

ONE of the Gold Coast’s best loved insolvency practitioners, Ginette Muller, has resigned from the board of the firm she helped bring to fame in Australia, FTI Consulting.

Muller will be best remembered for the kicking she copped from the Supreme Court of Queensland over her role in the liquidation of Peter Drake’s $2 billion property funds empire LM Investment Management though, to be fair, much of the criticism was thrown out on appeal.

Margin Call has been assured that you can still leave messages for Muller, but if the past week or two is anything to go by, she’s not calling back.

A receptionist at the insolvency outfit declined to comment on Muller’s employment status, instead referring inquiries to her partner in other people’s pain, John Park.