Lots of stakes, not much sizzle for ANZ

Stakes not sizzle at ANZ

Roll up, roll up, it’s Shayne Elliott’s $5.4 billion Asian jumble sale.

Up for grabs are a collection of curios from around the region in the shape of minority stakes in Asian banks.

Elliott’s predecessor as ANZ boss Mike Smith, who had plenty of Asian banking experience as head of HSBC in Hong Kong, never liked the minority ownership set-up he inherited from John McFarlane.

Smith used to say that while the Aussie bank might own a quarter of a foreign bank, it wore all the reputational risk.

While there’s no formal process under way, ANZ’s head of partnerships, Graham Hodges, has been charged with offloading the shop-soiled goods.

Take — please — ANZ’s quarter-stake in Malaysia’s AmBank, which is embroiled in a vast scandal involving sovereign wealth fund 1MDB and mysterious deposits of up to $US1bn in PM Najib Razak’s bank accounts at AmBank.

As The Oz has reported since August last year, the $1.4bn stake is for sale. But are there any buyers for this somewhat battered durian fruit?

Also on the block is 20 per cent of Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank, booked at $1.98bn and a $900 million slice of Indonesia’s Panin (which is getting a little dusty after failing to sell last year).

If they’re too big to fit in the boot there are smaller trinkets including 55 per cent of ANZ Royal, a JV with Cambodian tycoon Kith Meng, and 11.9 per cent of China’s Bank of Tianjin.

The latter started as a 20 per cent holding but ANZ has deliberately allowed it to run down.

Just in time, as a few days ago Bank of Tianjin admitted to the Honkers exchange it had been the victim of a $US120m rip-off in its mainland business.

ANZ Royal has also been battered, with Smith officially putting the stake in play in 2014 after the Cambodian bank’s role in a child labour scandal was exposed.

The motley collection is held on ANZ’s books at $5.4bn, a value that wasn’t cut in last year’s annual report. It’s hard to see that value surviving through to the half-year results.

Floats sunk

There’s never been a more exciting time to have your fintech IPO stopped by ASIC.

Afterpay, which offers a service allowing punters to pay for goods in instalments, is the latest ASX hopeful to be put in the freezer by Greg Medcraft’s nitpickers, who are wading through myriads of would-be tech floats as we approach dot.bomb 2.0.

This despite nimble, agile and innovative PM Malcolm Turnbull’s endless evocations of entrepreneurship.

The most epic example was Sam Lee’s Bitcoin group, which only got the hint and pulled its offer after six months of rebuffs.

Afterpay, founded by the former boss of legendary corporate raider Ron Brierley’s GPG, Anthony Eisen, and Nick Molnar, a former analyst for Mark Carnegie, is looking for $25m from punters.

It’s a fast-growing spin-off from Touchpay, headed by brothers Keith and Adrian Cleeve, which developed the tech and is to retain 30 per cent.

Afterpay is confident the interim stop order will be lifted. ASIC’s invigilators had less time than usual to look at the prospectus because it was lodged just before the Easter break.

How tweet it is

His penchant for living in a tent shows there’s no greater hipster than Jack Dorsey, founder of social network Twitter.

Dorsey, in Australia plugging his mobile payment system Square, has been staying atop a shopping centre in a tent hotel run by bar owner and festival promoter Jerome Borazio.

Happy glampers in the fancypants tents get complimentary hipster goods, a view over the Melbourne CBD and air con. Yes, in a tent.

It’s all a long way from Borazio’s most notorious effort, the aptly-named bar Shit Town, which operated in a grotty CBD stairwell through the late 00s.

In the Nick of time

Congratulations to Nick Whitlam (son of Gough), who is to receive an honorary doctorate today from the University of Western Sydney for “distinguished services to business and the broader community” following an action-packed career that included a banning from ASIC (later overturned) and a long-running feud with Turnbull over the firm they ran together.

Both have been resolved, with Whitlam winning against ASIC on appeal and patching things up (to a certain extent) with PM T after Gough’s death in 2014.

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