Nauru detention camp still delivering profits for Murphys family

Canstruct founder and Murphy family patriarch Robin Murphy with, from left, Daniel, Adrian and Rory. Picture: Darren England

Home Affairs might have turned off the flood of money flowing to Brisbane’s Murphy family for its contentious Nauru detention camp contract, but the deal has still delivered a humdinger of a profit to the family company in its last year of operations.

The Queensland-based family were once better known for their place in the state’s construction industry than for providing “garrison and welfare services” for the federal government’s offshore refugee detention program on Nauru.

But the $1.8bn rolling contract to run the detention camp on the Pacific island – won without tender in 2017 – has been the stuff from which financial empires are made.

Canstruct, the family construction business founded by patriarch Robin Murphy, is the company that ran the detention centre on behalf of Home ­Affairs.

The contract was helping deliver annual profits of more than $100m a year for the group’s parent company, Rard No 3 Pty Ltd, with the company booking a $127m net profit in the 2022 ­financial year.

That contract was closed off in September 2022, after Anthony Albanese beat out Scott Morrison for the right to hang out his clean daks on the Lodge’s clothesline.

But recently filed financial accounts for Rard No 3 show it still booked a pretty substantial profit last financial year, despite only booking a single month of providing services on Nauru.

Revenue for the year tumbled 62 per cent to $123.3m, down from $324.7m the year before. But Rard No 3 still managed to post a $75.1m profit for the year – despite only operating on Nauru for a single month.

And while Rard No 3 has other subsidiaries, its accounts also make it pretty clear that the Canstruct contract was its major line of business – the group employed only 20 people at the end of June last year, down from 92 the year before.

The company’s accounts noted that “although it is expected that there will be changes to the company’s activities in the near future, it is still unclear as to the extent of the changes predicted”.

While the loss of the Nauru contract won’t help the revenue line, Rard No 3 still has plenty of financial headroom. It was holding $60m in cash at the end of last financial year, with someone – presumably Home Affairs – still to pay another $10.5m in invoices.

Oh, and Rard No 3 also held another $414.1m in investments in financial assets.

Jamaica journey

From secrecy of the government kind to that of the corporate brand, a friend of Margin Call recently pointed out a weird little curiosity concerning Andrew Forrest’s green energy fundraising arm, Fortescue Capital.

Going by filings to IP Australia, the trademark for the company appears to have first been registered in Jamaica.

Andrew Forrest. Picture: AFP

It has been pretty difficult to keep track of Fortescue’s far-flung green energy deals over the last few years, granted, but Margin Call is pretty certain that Jamaica is one of the few countries in the world that Forrest and his green hordes haven’t promised to build a multibillion-dollar green energy plant.

So what gives?

The answer appears to lie in the fact that Jamaica is both a member of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, and doesn’t have an online registry of trademark and other filings.

The former means that, if you file a trademark application in Jamaica first, the date of the application – and trademark protection – counts in most other global jurisdictions (such as Australia).

The latter means that anyone who wants to spend their spare moments trawling through what trademark applications have been filed recently, and by whom, needs to toddle into downtown Kingston to conduct a search in person at the Jamaica Intellectual Property Office.

So essentially, if you want to register a trademark for a new business – and don’t want to make things easy for bored journalists looking for an easy story – Jamaica is pretty much your destination of choice.

A test for Tonkin

There will be plenty of market interest in the proposed $2.2bn merger between mid-tier gold miners Silver Lake Resource and Red 5 – if for no other reason than as a sign of whether a broader consolidation push in Australia’s gold sector is likely to win support.

But the more pressing question doing the rounds of West Perth in regard to the transaction is whether notoriously curmudgeonly Silver Lake boss Luke Tonkin will be able to bring himself to get out and promote the translation while the deal is in play.

Silver Lake is the target, but Tonkin will take control of the combined company if the deal completes – so you’d think he might have some interest in getting out to sell the deal.

But Tonkin doesn’t really talk to anyone – journalists, analysts, even fundies have long complained that the Silver Lake boss doesn’t appear to give a sod what they think about anything.

So much so that he didn’t bother to front the merger call when the deal was announced on Monday, leaving Red 5 chairman Russell Clark and managing director Mark Williams to sell the case.

That issue was raised by Cannacord’s Tim McCormack, who asked Clark – who will be the chairman of the combined company, under current arrangements – whether he planned to do something to improve Silver Lake’s engagement with the market.

That is something that the boards of both companies plan to embrace, according to Clark.

“There is something to market here and I think that you will see this deal being marketed well. And as we go forward into MergeCo it’s certainly a focus of the Red 5 board that we perhaps work harder at marketing the combined group,” he said.

That’s about to be put to the test, with a deal roadshow to hit broking houses and fund managers at the back end of the week.

Margin Call hears there’s a bit of spirited debate among the West Perth set over whether Tonkin makes good on Silver Lake’s promise to jointly market the deal.

To be fair to the Silver Lake boss, though, even his detractors won’t argue about his record as a hard-nosed operator of mines. And his supporters argue that he’s a pretty decent bloke in private, with a well-balanced personality, and simply prefers to let the company’s operating results do the talking, rather putting on a shiny suit and spivving up a bad result with a glossy presentation.