Myer’s new King awaits coronation

Cartoon: Rod Clement.

Billionaire Solomon Lew’s new Myer nemesis John King has arrived in the country ahead of the issuing of his working visa from Peter Dutton’s Immigration Department.

Margin Call spotted the former House of Fraser chief executive — sporting a tan worthy of his erstwhile base in Florida — at Geoff Culbert’s Sydney Airport yesterday morning with Myer’s cheque-writing executive chairman Garry “Old Fashioned” Hounsell.

Had the pair of retailers had a mini-break in Sydney ahead of another busy week attempting to resuscitate the $340 million department store chain?

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get an answer. King and his new boss Hounsell had retreated to Qantas chairman Leigh Clifford’s private lounge before we cleared Culbert’s security team.

We’ve since learned the pair were bound for Myer’s head office in Melbourne where Hounsell yesterday gave the staff an old-fashioned introduction to the new King, who is not allowed to begin working in the job proper until he gets the nod from Team Dutton.

Myer’s share price yesterday fell 3.5 per cent to close at 42c. 

Bad early reviews on the visiting CEO-elect? Or perhaps has there been an unannounced hitch with King’s still-to-be-approved visa?

Corridors of power

One of David Murray’s soon-to-be AMP boardmates Peter Varghese was in the budget eve crowd at Parliament House coffee shop Aussies.

Julie Bishop’s now Brisbane-based former chief mandarin Varghese was in Canberra yesterday to give an update on the India Economic Strategy he was last year set as homework by the PM. Beats talking about fees-for-no-service and all other hot topics that will dominate AMP’s ominous AGM in Melbourne on Thursday.

Things could be worse — just ask endangered Lottoland boss Luke Brill, who we bumped into (flanked by lobbyists) after his meeting with the office of ­Communications Minister Mitch Fifi eld. Margin Call gathers the afternoon crisis meeting didn’t change Fifield’s intention to continue the government’s eradication of the Gibraltar-headquartered, NT-licensed Lottoland and its synthetic lottery peers. Preparations for the execution of the barely taxed Gibraltarians are set to resume on Wednesday, once the budget is out of the way.

After Fifield, Brill set off for an evening meeting with ALP communications spokesman Michelle Rowland’s office. Could Team Shorten come to the rescue?

Margin Call can reveal Brill has hired a new Labor-aligned lobbyist Claire March, a former staffer to Stephen Conroy now at Hawker Britton, to complement Brill’s Liberal-alignedAndrew Humpherson, who works at Hawker Britton’s sister firm Barton Deakin. We’ll find out soon if the lobbyist duo can deliver the seemingly impossible.

Danger averted

Now to solve Kristina Keneally’s riddle about BCA campaigner Andrew Bragg and scandalous data firm Cambridge Analytica (of Donald Trump infamy). 

It’s a matter of record that BCA chief Jennifer Westacott and her president Grant King meet with Cambridge Analytica — and a host of other political campaigning outfits — in Washington last September.

So what about Bragg?

Given Labor’s new terror of big business, Keneally has, understandably, keenly pursued the dealings by former Liberal Party acting federal director Bragg and the soon-to-close Cambridge Analytica.

Margin Call can confirm Bragg met with Cambridge Analytica’s Sydney University-educated Peter Jones in Sydney before Christmas. That was a few months after Westacott and King met with the firm.

The BCA trio decided Cambridge Analytica —  which once had as its vice-president Trump whisperer Steve Bannon — was not a good fit for the big business lobby.  

“We ruled them out on probity grounds last year. That was before everyone else discovered they were bad,” a BCA spokesman told Margin Call.

And what about the BCA’s new campaigning outfit, the Centre Ground (publisher of the much discussed For The Common Good website)? 

Nope. No Cambridge Analytica connection there either.

MLC manoeuvres

NAB’s restless CEO Andrew Thorburn has rearranged his pinstripes ahead of the $4 billion severing of the bank’s wealth arm MLC.

Dairy farmer-turned-investment banker Nathan Goonan — the one with the farm-boy manner and rainman mind — is taking charge of NAB’s group strategy and development team.

The elevation will make Goonan — who has been running the bank’s corporate affairs team — a direct report to man most likely to become NAB’s next CEO, fellow Thorburn-favourite Antony ‘Not Anthony’ Cahill, the bank’s chief operating officer. Jason Laird of Telstra pedigree will take over the corporate affairs team.

Goonan’s most important assignment in his new role advising Thorburn on buying and selling businesses? Finding the most profitable way out of MLC, the wealth business NAB bought from Lendlease for $4.6bn back in 2000.

Simon Moore, the long-serving pinstriped banker Goonan is replacing, was integral to NAB’s MLC acquisition.

Moore — a brother of $285 million man Nicholas Moore, the stonkingly rich CEO of Macquarie Group — has led NAB’s M&A team since 2000. He joined the bank in 1995.

Over that period brother Simon has advised five NAB CEOs: Don Argus, Frank Cicutto, John Stewart, Cameron Clyne and, last of all, Thorburn, as the Melbourne-headquartered Big Four has expanded and retreated from the various non-core businesses that have come in and out of Australian banking fashion.

And all the while his brother Nicholas has been piling up the Macquarie dosh (last year he was paid $20 million on top of the $12 million in dividends Moore earned on his $253 million worth of Macquarie shares), in between threatening to relocate Mac Bank's obscenely remunerated vampiric kangaroos to Singapore. Despite all that, working at boring old NAB has been the more scandalous career path in the Moore clan. Funny old world.

Goonan’s is also a powerful financial family. His better half is Emma Cahill, once of UBS and no relation to NAB’s chief operating officer. She’s now general counsel at Ben Gray’s famously hyped-up private equity shop BGH Capital.

There has been speculation MLC could move to private equity ownership. Could make for some interesting family meals at Chez Cahill-Goonan.