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Masterchef George Calombaris’ $7.5m property portfolio

George Calombaris at the Press Club
George Calombaris at the Press Club

Network Ten celebrity chef George Calombaris has assembled a residential property portfolio worth about as much as the $7.8 million his restaurant company underpaid its restaurant workers.

A Margin Call investigation reveals the 40-year-old MasterChef judge forked out $2.2m for a new weekender on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula in June last year.

That mortgage-free, 6,000-square-metre purchase came just 14 months after Calombaris’s MAdE Establishment confessed it had underpaid its workers by $2.6m — a third of the $7.8m the Fair Work Ombudsman today ruled had been underpaid to its staff.

All up, Calombaris has outlaid $7.53m over the past six years on his portfolio of homes. Their value will be much more than that now.

MAdE — which has now repaid monies owed to staff at The Press Club and Jimmy Grants and was slapped with a $200,000 “contrition payment” — is virtually 50-50 owned by Calombaris and his business partner Redek Sali, who was a former boss of vitamin giant Swisse and is estimated to be worth more than $200m.

The Arthurs Seat home is controlled by Calombaris’s vehicle Trical Beach Pty Ltd.

Calombaris’s wife Natalie Tricarico, 42, is the sole director of the company after the entrepreneurial chef — who lives in a Toorak mansion with his young family — resigned from the group as a director and company secretary in May last year.

Calombaris remains a 50-50 shareholder in Trical with Tricarico, who is a marketing consultant.

Their property vehicle also owns a second home on Victoria’s east coast at Safety Beach, which was purchased for $580,000 in mid-2013 and then mortgaged to ANZ three years later.

Tricarico and Calombaris, who have been together for more than a decade, were married in a ceremony in Greece in September last year.

The family’s Melbourne home is a five-bedroom French provincial-style Toorak mansion in one of the prestigious suburb’s exclusive courts.

That property, which features an underground car park and swimming pool, was purchased in Tricarico’s name in November 2013 for $4.75m.

The couple bought it after selling another home in Toorak for $2.8m in early 2014, which again was only in the name of Calombaris’s wife.

News of the large scale underpayments of MAdE’s workforce comes as the CBS-controlled Network Ten’s wildly successful MasterChef franchise — in which Calombaris and his flagship Press Room restaurant have starred — enters the final week of its eleventh series.

Last May, one month after the initial news broke that Calombaris’s establishments had underpaid staff, the chef resigned as a director of MAdE Establishment. He remains a shareholder via his private George C Pty Ltd.

Last year was a time of frenetic corporate activity for Calombaris.

From April through to July he resigned as a director of 30 corporate vehicles of which he was a director.

But there is room for regrowth.

At the end of February the on-air favourite on Paul Anderson’s Network Ten created a new corporate vehicle GaryGeorge&Matt Pty Ltd, with his MasterChef fellow judges Gary Mehigan and Matt Preston as co-directors and equal shareholders.

Here’s hoping everyone gets paid.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/margin-call/masterchef-george-calombaris-75m-property-portfolio/news-story/d5e43362a3f352c6a5fa0f869f8050e5