Margin Call: From turnaround guru to ski masseur

Peter Nicholson 20150415

Followers of the Rene Rivkin saga have been having a wry laugh about his former driver Gordon Wood’s new claim that he’d been earning more than $400,000 a year and as much as $800,000 back in 1998, three years after the mysterious death of his girlfriend Caroline Byrne in Sydney in June 1995.

Wood, who was cleared of her murder in 2012 by the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal after more than three years in jail, is suing the state of NSW for wrongful imprisonment and has thrown in a claim for lost earnings of between $8.9 million and $17.8m based on what he says he had been earning before he was prosecuted. We’ll stay away from the porridge saga but the lost earnings claim can only be based on a job he held briefly in England starting in April 1998 with a company called PressTech Controls.

Up to that point Wood had had a varied career as an usher at the Sydney Opera House, a gym instructor and then Rivkin’s driver, so it was a major step up when the British company hired him for a salary of £500 a day as a supposed corporate turnaround specialist, on a recommendation of a Welsh accountant called Glyn Harris.

That only lasted until the end of 1999, since when his career highlight seems to have been as a part-time masseur in the French ski resort of Megeve.

According to journalist Neil Chenoweth’s book Packer’s Lunch, published in 2006, Harris later admitted he’d invented the turnaround story in Wood’s work history because someone (who to this day has never been identified) had recommended Wood to him. We know it’s hard for recently released prisoners to get well paid work but that’s hardly an employment reference. In the Crown’s defence document, solicitor Richard Kelly rejected Wood’s claims.

Bucknell’s UK lessons

It’s not every day the Poms listen rapt to financial ideas from Australia, usually making smart remarks about Poseidon Nickel despite the passage of almost half a century.

But the founder of On-Market BookBuilds, Ben Bucknell, is off to London in the coming days to preach the virtues of using online technology to make capital raising for listed companies simpler and fairer.

He will be the star turn on Tuesday at the London Business School in Regent’s Park in explaining how the new technology works in Australia.

On-Market BookBuilds licenses its system to the ASX and is now getting a run of smaller raisings, to the extent that some of the bigger investment banks are looking nervously at an innovation that could end up eating into their fee income.

The system, devised to give small shareholders the same opportunities as the big houses despite not having a golfing relationship with lead managers and the like, has attracted positive comment from British equity raising guru Lord Myners, who has been tasked with working up the best way to manage privatisations in Britain.

Everyone’s far too polite to mention Royal Mail, which was sold off in October 2013 at 330 pence a share only to have the price run up subsequently ran up to 618 pence. That infuriated taxpayers and left the advisers looking particularly silly.

Bucknell, a recovering lawyer and escapee from Macquarie, will be accompanied by co-founder Rosemary Kennedy.

Durkan comes clean

Finally some refreshing honesty of what really happens in head office. Coles managing director John Durkan summarised life at Coles Tooronga HQ at the third annual Global Food Forum in Melbourne yesterday. In discussing how he is getting Coles’ army of buyers out in the field, “we’ve been pushing that hard, because nothing really happens in Tooronga in reality”, Durkan told John Durie in an interview. “We’re just a big bed of bureaucracy.” Over to you, Richard Goyder.

Menzies’ brutal truth

Assistant Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told yesterday how back in 2010 when he was standing for the Melbourne federal seat of Kooyong he got some useful advice from former incumbent Andrew Peacock: keep your speeches short.

He recounted that Peacock, who held the seat from 1966 to 1994, had asked his predecessor in the seat, Robert Menzies, to cast an eye over a speech that Peacock was about to make.

The elder statesman’s opinion of it was brisk: “It’s too long.’’

“What should I do?” asked Peacock.

“Cut it in half.”

“Which half?” asked the anxious younger man.

“Doesn’t matter,’’ growled the ancient.