Masters sale nearing Home stretch

Illustration: Rod Clement.

The David Di Pilla-led Home Investments Consortium of rich-listers is to relaunch its $835 million reinvention of Woolworths’ disastrous Masters hardware chain in about two months.

The move will come regardless of whether the Masters vendors — Brad Banducci’s Woolies and its estranged joint-venture partner, US retail giant Lowe’s — have settled a protracted arbitration of their dispute over the demise of the national hardware chain.

The deal for the sale of 61 Masters sites to Home was struck in August last year.

But, embarrassingly, almost a year later the deal is yet to close due to the legal dispute, which the Federal Court has ­ordered must be settled via an ­independent arbitrator.

Regardless, it is believed Di Pilla’s consortium is planning to throw open the doors of its first shopping mall in Penrith, in Sydney’s west, in ­October.

The group seems to be confident it will settle with Woolies regardless of whether the fight with Lowe’s is resolved.

Woolies has given the group access to sites to start building and has allowed Home to move to sell or lease eight sites around the country that don’t fit its plans.

Whatever it takes for Banducci to sweep away the Masters mess, which cost Woolies shareholders more than $3 billion over its unhappy corporate life.

It seems Woolies’ decision to settle the properties with Home before it reaches an agreement with Lowe’s will expose it to ­unknown financial risk over a subsequent settlement with the US group.

Could Masters cause the Bella Vista-headquartered retailer still more heartburn? Woolies didn’t respond to ­inquiries on the matter.

Aurrum who’s who

It seems the power and sway of David Di Pilla’s Home Investments Consortium has kept Woolies on track towards the Masters real estate sale.

After all, it’s an all-star corporate cast.

Di Pilla chairs the for-profit aged-care group Aurrum, which makes up 57 per cent of the Home group, which for now looks to be run out of the Aurrum offices in Sydney’s Double Bay, not far from Di Pilla’s home up the road in Bellevue Hill.

Aurrum is backed by the Salteri family, whose money is managed by former UBS banker Di Pilla by virtue of marriage.

UBS boss/rock star Matthew Grounds and his fellow Swiss banker exec Robbie Vanderzeil are also investors in Aurrum, as is former UBS banker William McMicking.

In for an 11.3 per cent share of Home are rich-listers Morry Fraid and Zac Fried through their Spotlight Group, while the Chemist Warehouse Group controlled by the rich-list Gance and Verrocchi families also has a similar-sized stake.

A later entrant to the Home consortium comes from the west via Prime West Funds, which was founded and is run by John Bond, the son of the late corporate crook Alan Bond.

Prime West came on late last year to also take an 11.3 per cent stake.

And finally there are Mary and Alexander Shaw, who have about 3 per cent and who come to the table as founders of Aurrum, in which they are also still investors.

With Amazon on the horizon, what could possibly go wrong?

Cop that, cuz

Greg Medcraft’s Australian Securities & Investments Commission has pinged a target close to home: Medcraft’s cousin, Russell Medcraft.

Company records show cousin Medcraft is the sole director and major shareholder of financial services provider Financial Choice, which has just been fined $21,600 by ASIC over misleading marketing material.

Financial Choice’s Russell Medcraft.

It shows no one is beyond the law with this top cop on the beat.

“Firms must ensure their marketing materials and promotional statements are based on fact,” deputy chairman Peter Kell said in a statement announcing the fine.

Cousin Medcraft’s first sin was to falsely claim in emails to potential clients that Financial Choice had been asked by its superannuation fund to conduct a survey into its superannuation. It hadn’t.

The second sin was misleading the marketing about Financial Choice’s paid-for service that locates lost superannuation. That’s a service, ASIC pointed out, that is offered free by Chris Jordan’s Australian Taxation Office.

ASIC chairman Medcraft — whose time as the nation’s chief corporate cop ends in November — recused himself from the familial matter to avoid any conflict of interest.

Still, the episode could make an extended Medcraft family Christmas an awkward affair this year, especially if it upsets the $4.8m acquisition of cousin Medcraft’s business by Keith Cullen’s ASX-listed financial group Spring FG.

It must make the much-speculated-on OECD secretary-general on financial markets and enterprise affairs job in Paris even more alluring for the Chinese tea-sipping Medcraft.

After upsetting so many in the local market, fingers crossed for Medcraft’s post-ASIC bon voyage.

In Gina we trust

It’s not only Bill Shorten who has an issue with family trusts.

As iron ore empress Gina Rinehart knows only too well, trust structures can create a host of problems — and that’s in addition to the reduced tax take that has excited the Opposition Leader.

Today, Rinehart’s interminable family trust dispute with her son John Hancock and daughter Bianca Rinehart will bob up again in the Supreme Court.

This latest episode in a case that entered the court in 2011 is a procedural matter over a returned subpoena.

John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart.

But looming in the near future is a high-stakes decision in the Federal Court in a related Rinehart family trust matter.

A full sitting of the Federal Court — led by Chief Justice James Allsop together with justices Anthony Besanko and David O’Callaghan — is almost at the end of its six-month period for deciding whether Rinehart’s children can take their family trust dispute to a public trial.

Hancock chairwoman Rinehart (last valued at $10.4 billion, making her the richest women in Australia by some distance) wants to keep the dispute in private arbitration and away from the prying public.

We could find out whether the epic trust battle will get the full public treatment as soon as the end of the week, although the judges could ask for an extension.

It won’t be just the younger Rineharts hoping for a public hearing.

A billionaire family squabble over a family trust would make for a perfect backdrop to Shorten’s tax change, which he will outline at this weekend’s NSW Labor Party conference.