“Celebrity fund manager” and confirmed self-promoter Clayton Larcombe has been happy to comb through the minute detail of his meteoric rise from country kid to apparent investment whiz overseeing what is claimed to be around $500m in funds under management.
The anecdotes rolled easily off his tongue in a podcast interview with home-loans entrepreneur Mark Bouris – who has invested with Larcombe, the founder and boss of PAC Capital.
There was the heady tale of following Morgan Stanley’s then managing director through Sydney streets to interrupt his Friday lunch at Machiavelli to tell the surprised executive “you’ve made a big mistake” when a university-aged Larcombe had been knocked back for an internship.
Or how, at the height of the GFC, he charmed his way into a trading job at JPMorgan’s Hong Kong office after first being told to get on a plane back to Sydney by a senior boss who had just fired 50 people and wasn’t exactly looking for new talent.
But among all the colourful tales of success (and there’s been enough of that for Larcombe to recently splash just over $33m on a home at Bellevue Hill) there was curiously little about the travails of his dad Mark Larcombe.
In 2009, Larcombe senior was hit with a 10-year ban from working as a real estate agent by the NSW Office of Fair Trading for “despicable” behaviour...
In a court case before the ban, Justice George Palmer found that Larcombe senior, at the time an agent with LJ Hooker Manly, had negotiated the sale of a two-storey property in Manly to his own company, Varinya, for $880,200 – but one year later sold that same property for $1.935m.
Now that’s the kind of return PAC Capital investors would love to see!
That massive million-dollar profit on the sale of the property was rather a surprise to the former elderly owner who was told by their agent Larcombe that a better price wasn’t on offer – and to take the $880,200 offered by his private company.
In the press coverage the judge said he had no hesitation in concluding that in procuring the purchase by Varinya of the property from the elderly vendor, Larcombe had “breached his fiduciary duty as agent for sale in preferring his own financial interest to his duty of loyalty” to the client.
Liberals battle for values in Higgins
Wouldn’t it be a great idea if a Liberal member of parliament actually stood up for traditional Liberal values? This is what the party members of Victorian federal electorate Higgins are asking themselves when over the weekend the unofficial starting gun was fired for preselection for the once blue-ribbon seat.
Higgins was one of the handful of traditional Liberal seats that fell to the teal-ALP left wing wave in the last federal election as citizens of some of Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs turfed out Liberal member Katie Allen and put in (gasp, clutch one’s pearls) a Labor member, Michelle Ananda-Rajah.
The preselection is likely to be held at the end of the year, with about 800 party members eligible to vote.
Two candidates are the frontrunners and, metaphorically speaking, will soon be parading before local members like a peacock proudly displaying their feathers to a prospective mate.
William Stoltz has the type of CV that looks to have been written for the times with a potent mix of national security and cyber intelligence experience. He is an Australian national security professional and security scholar, a lecturer and expert associate at the ANU’s National Security College and a senior manager at leading cybersecurity firm, CyberCX.
A graduate of the local prestigious St Kevin’s College, his LinkedIn feed is full of the type of activity that would make any true Liberal happy.
A member of the Liberal Party his entire adult life, he only publicly “outed” himself as a Liberal this month, as he felt it best to keep it quiet while he was in the public service. He has reflected that it was reminiscent of the anxieties surrounding him coming out as gay.
His chief rival for the hearts and minds of Higgins’ Liberal members is likely to be Marcus Pearl. Pearl is a classic Liberal with a focus on the economy and a track record of the type of economic and political achievements that would make Robert Menzies grin.
Pearl was the first ever Liberal mayor of Port Phillip Council – which neighbours Higgins – so has a track record of beating Greens and the ALP at local politics. Port Phillip Council, where he remains a councillor, also has no debt and $150m in reserves. It was the only council in Victoria not to pass on the rate rises to residents in the most recent round of government-approved rate hikes.
So it’s no surprise that if and when Pearl gets to chat to Higgins’ Liberal members he will be pushing a strong and hard line on fiscal responsibility. Pearl, who is moving into the electorate, is also a former senior executive at ANZ and Allianz and the current CEO of financial advisory and consulting services firm QMV.
Oh, and he has a son called Menzies – now that’s commitment to the cause!
As for former member Allen, locals believe she is keen to run again. But her decision to cross the floor last year on amendments to the religious discrimination bill and sit with the then ALP opposition has upset many Liberal true believers.
Making matters worse, she later appeared on the ABC Q&A program, where she explained her reasons for not supporting the then Liberal government on the floor of the house, to which she received a round of applause from the overwhelmingly lefty ABC audience.
It looks like other possible Higgins contenders Georgina Downer, daughter of one-time Liberal leader and former foreign minister Alexander Downer, and Roshena Campbell, noted barrister who ran unsuccessfully for the federal Aston by-election earlier this year, will sit this one out.
Kogan versus NBG
It looks like Ruslan Kogan’s Kogan.com has reached a settlement with its on again/off again business partner in New York who works out of a flat in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York.
In 2019 Kogan.com had agreed to purchase certain goods from a mysterious firm called NBG Trade run by an even more mysterious entrepreneur called Dov Zaetz, and later Kogan.com placed five orders for merchandise with NBG, paying deposits on each order and totalling just under $US1m. Those goods never arrived and Kogan.com has been chasing NBG and Zaetz ever since.
This month in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York the parties reported to Judge Marcia M. Henry that they had reached a settlement in principle with the paperwork to be filed in a few weeks.
Zaetz’s sparse LinkedIn profile has been inactive for months and has scant details about what he actually does for a living. In his LinkedIn page his NBG business was described as a “wholesale distributor of brand name goods” since 2018 and in 2017 it was called a “luxury trader”.
More wrongs than rights at the AHRC?
A case of curious priorities over at the Australian Human Rights Commission where hand-picked appointee Giridharan Sivaraman seems to prefer playing politics over action on anti-Semitism.
Freehills partner given notice over synagogue tweet
Herbert Smith Freehills leaders have voted to remove one of its longstanding partners, Damien Hazard, over a ‘deeply offensive’ tweet targeting Jeremy Leibler.