Margin Call: All eyes on HQ as judgement looms in Cormack Foundation battle

Michael Kroger leaves the Federal Court in March. (Stuart McEvoy/The Australian)

Having delivered his ornate adjudication on ASIC’s rate rigging case against Westpac,

Justice Jonathan Beach has turned his Ludwig Wittgenstein-loving mind to Michael Kroger, the Victorian Liberal Party and the $70 million Cormack Foundation.

Beach’s decision on the blue blood civil war is due any day now.

Margin Call understands Beach’s delay — the judgement was due before the end of May — is related to the considerable time spent peering into the idiosyncratic mind of Westpac trader Colin “The Rat” Roden, The Rat’s use of the F-bomb and Beach’s misplacing of a volume by Martin Heidegger.

We understand there’s a thought experiment used by the German philosopher that Beach believes would perfectly illuminate the battle between Kroger’s Victorian Liberal Party and the Charles Goode-chaired Cormack Foundation over the ownership of its $70 million honey pot.

If only Beach could find that bloody volume …

There have been some notable events in the two months since Beach’s federal court in

Melbourne was graced by Kroger, his fashionable personal assistant Carlie Boal, the Liberal Party’s barristers Michael Wyles and Bret Walker and their opponents Goode, his fellow Cormack directors, including Newcrest chair Peter Hay and Cormack alumni Hugh Morgan, and their wealthy barrister Allan Myers (as with the Cormack crew a Melbourne Club man).

Event number one is well documented. Kroger was last month returned, with a thumping majority, as the Liberal’s president in Victoria.

Michael Kroger leaving Federal Court with his personal assistant Carlie Boal. (David Geraghty/The Australian)

Event number two is more covert. Margin Call can reveal Kroger’s newly elected Victorian party treasurer David Mond, 65, was last week appointed a director of the Victorian Liberal’s company Vapold Pty Ltd.

The trained accountant Mond joins the 80-year-old Stewart McArthur (a former federal MP now better known as a Melbourne Club man and whose young wife Beverley McArthur has been mooted as a possible challenger to Liberal senator Jane Hume), former federal Liberal president Alan Stockdale, former Howard minister Richard Alston and Kevin Andrews’ cheery electorate officer Russell Hannan.

David Williamson, Tim Duncan and Charles Goode leaving the Federal Court. (David Geraghty/The Australian)

Vapold is the vehicle that holds 104 Exhibition Street, the commercial tower that houses a Subway, a Bill Henson-loving art gallery and the Victorian Liberals HQ.

The six-level building is the Victorian Liberal’s most valuable asset (unless, like Kroger, you place the Cormack booty on the Liberal’s balance sheet, rhetorically if not literally).

104 Exhibition Street has been the subject of endless offers by the usual suspects in Melbourne property circles. Offers approaching $30 million have been mooted.

104 Exhibition St, Melbourne, headquarters of the Liberal Party.

Following the March hearing in the federal court, it has been suggested the stately building — against which the Liberals have a $2 million facility with Andrew Thorburn’s NAB — could be sold in the event of an unfavourable judgement by Beach.

Whether Kroger would actually do that is a matter for him, the administration committee he dominates and Vapold, a company whose five directors are all incorrigible Kroger men.

And, who knows, perhaps Beach will soon deploy Heidegger in Kroger’s favour.

Read the full Margin Call column tomorrow in print and online.