‘House of horrors’ up for sale; Melbourne Cup-winning trainers’ cash bonanza shemozzle
Not even a year ago were we reading headlines that said Alan and Rebecca Yazbek had purchased a tumbledown dwelling called Hambleton House in Melbourne’s Albert Park, a “house of horrors”, as The Age once described it, where residents with disabilities and mental illness lived in squalor until the place was finally shut during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In stepped the Yazbeks with visions of a do-up, paying $11m in May for the mansion originally listed for between $9m and $10m on St Vincent Place North.
For two years no one would buy it, so how the Yazbeks landed on a purchase price of $11m defies our understanding of supply and demand dynamics. But anyway.
This all happened before the Yazbeks’ Nomad Group of restaurants began being boycotted by diners, and before Nomad Group was rebranded with the name Edition Hospitality – and before Alan was removed as a director of the business for displaying a Nazi swastika at a pro-Palestine rally.
Now we learn that Hambleton House has discreetly come back on the market, although you won’t find any listing online. A sell-off so soon after purchase? Could the reason be a cashflow problem the Yazbeks are facing, or might there be other reasons for some financial disentanglement? “We’ve bought and sold several properties over the years as part of our investment portfolio,” Rebecca told us.
“This property was purchased last year as an investment with a view to selling, and even though it’s not officially on the market, the property has attracted a lot of interest from potential buyers.”
A quick sale in the works by the sounds of it then. YB
Melbourne Cup winnings shemozzle
Few pay days are as enormous for a horse trainer as winning the Melbourne Cup, but collecting their $464,000 slice of the prize money is turning into a nightmare for Sheila Laxon and John Symons.
Their cash was wrongly wired to a company that has just gone into liquidation, leaving the trainers with little option but to sue Racing Victoria to reclaim their missing winnings.
Readers will recall their gelding, Knight’s Choice, stormed home at Flemington to deliver a fairytale $81 payout to punters, Laxon among them. Her name should chime for anyone who remembers Ethereal’s win during the 2001 Melbourne Cup. Laxon trained Ethereal and wore a pendant containing some of the horse’s hair as she watched Knight’s Choice cross the line in November.
A bizarre administrative mistake, both Laxon and Symons had trained horses in Melbourne under the banner of Esprit Racing. The outdated company details, including the bank account where winnings were supposed to be deposited, remain on file with Racing Victoria, meaning the prize money went to Esprit and not to their new entity, Symons Laxon Racing.
Laxon and Symons parted ways with Esprit years ago and were never actually listed as directors or shareholders, and now they’ve lawyered up to formally lodge documents in the Queensland Supreme Court to sue Racing Victoria for rightful recovery of their cash – because there’s really not much point in suing Esprit when the sole director has just called in Malcolm Howell of insolvency experts Jirsch Sutherland.
Unclear, too, what triggered the decision to liquidate, but Racing Victoria recently sent a letter of demand to an individual associated with Esprit. Not that it will have much of an impact on any future legal action, but it does effectively warn this person to stay off the track until the prize money is repaid.
Racing Victoria told us it couldn’t comment, other than to say it has “paid out all Melbourne Cup prizemoney as required, including to the bank account registered with us” for Ms Laxon and Mr Symons.
“We have taken the steps available to us to assist Ms Laxon and Mr Symons in recovering the money from what RV has subsequently been advised is their former account,” it said. NE
Making a meal of it
Messy dealings in the Federal Court between oddball barrister Gina Edwards and Nine’s A Current Affair program. Edwards successfully sued ACA over her wild portrayal as a dog thief in a series of television segments aired in 2021, and this will soon force Nine to pay up a heap of dough to settle accounts for the legals costs.
Justice Michael Wigney has already ruled that ACA defamed Edwards with some classically yellow journalism that accused her of stealing a cavoodle. Nine paid Edwards $150,000 in damages, but lawyers’ fees are trending towards $1.2m.
Enter Edwards’ former solicitor Rebekah Giles. She took the case on spec and is arguing the $1.2m still to come from Nine is actually owed to her, not Edwards, for legal work that remains unpaid.
Edwards disagrees, although she argued her point in spectacularly unusual fashion during a hearing to hash this all out last week, Wigney himself getting in the spirit and dubbing the claims and cross-claims a “dog’s breakfast”. Ruff!
Asked to respond to Giles’s argument, Edwards said: “Your Honour, I apologise. I’m very nervous,” which is odd for a working barrister to concede, only she then seemingly put her foot in it and cast a bizarre aspersion on Wigney’s impartiality, telling the judge that she knew of a lunch he’d enjoyed with Nine’s barrister, Dauid Sibtain SC, some months earlier.
But Edwards didn’t bring this up to seek that Wigney recuse himself from the case – instead, as she said, she just wanted to mention the matter and note how she had been “troubled by this information”. Cue much side-eye around the court. Imagine thinking there are gains to be made by pointlessly embarrassing a judge.
Edwards went one further and asked whether it was Sibtain who initiated the lunch, or whether it was hizzoner himself.
“I have absolutely no recollection,” Wigney said. “I don’t even have a recollection about the lunch,” he added, which seemed to be an unintended burn of Sibtain; surely he isn’t such a forgettable lunch companion.
Wigney did, however, almost challenge Edwards to make the application, which she didn’t. “Well, go right ahead, if you want to,” he said. But in the end she sat down, and not before turning to her friends in the gallery to ask whether she did a good job. YB
More Coverage
Gupta’s house of home loan horrors
Whatever interest rate you’re paying on your home loan, pie-in-face expert Sanjeev Gupta is almost certainly paying more.
Canva overhauls office policy after pro-Hamas event balls-up
Design firm Canva has been forced into a hasty overhaul of its office policy guidelines after hosting a Sydney event featuring pro-Hamas speakers.