NIA wipe-out creates a web of intrigue

Cartoon: Peter Nicholson

It’ll be interesting to see if mates of Les Webb are as keen to tip cash into the next company with which the entrepreneurial Melbourne lawyer is involved following yesterday’s wipe-out at health.com.au operator NIA.

NIA investors, including Spotlight fabric tsar Morry Fraid, top criminal silk Robert Richter, magistrate Charlie Rozencwajg, former Brisbane Lions chairman Angus Johnson and Webb himself tipped $32 million into the company.

But as foreshadowed (Margin Call, June 16), NIA shareholders are set to do most of their dough because it hasn’t been able to pay back the full $52m owed to another company in Webb’s web, iSelect.

It looks like NIA’s board, including former NSW opposition leader John Brogden, are sharing in the pain, with a document filed with ASIC this month revealing that directors’ fees have been paid in the company’s largely worthless stock rather than cold hard cash.

iSelect, where Webb is on the board, hasn’t been the “shoot the lights out” performer promised when it floated two years ago. Yesterday it hit its issue price, $1.85, for the first time amid relief that the NIA outcome wasn’t a complete disaster.

Webb is also on the board of payday lender Nimble Money, which in February told would-be investors it hoped to IPO within a year — something that now seems unlikely as the float window is fast shutting.

Nimble investors, including Webb, fellow iSelect director Damien Waller, former Wotif CFO Sam Friend, Acorn Capital and Monash Investors, will no doubt be hoping its 2015 accounts, due soon at ASIC, show better performance than last year’s $210,000 loss.

Cashing in at Crown

Motorboating mogul James Packer is back on deck at Crown this week, no doubt ready to cut a deal with Borat after a revitalising Vegas serenade from songbird squeeze Mariah Carey.

As Margin Call has previously revealed (June 25, July 15), privatising the Crown empire is not impossible, but would involve convincing everyone from former Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer to nightclubbing Pratt heiress Heloise Waislitz to hand in their scrip.

The register from which those names came was in part unreadable, but Crown has kindly sent better quality pages.

They show that as of January 30, shopping centre wizard John Gandel and his family held shares worth about $1.4m.

Kazakhstan, the home of fictional mankini wearer Borat (aka Sacha Baron Cohen), held about $460,000 worth of stock for make benefit glorious nation.

Other Crown shareholders have included Cricket Australia, which has held $300,000 worth, although when isn’t clear. Happily, betting has never been a problem in cricket.

One shareholder Packer won’t have to deal with is the scourge of Paul Little’s Essendon, Federal Court judge John Middleton.

His Honour’s super fund held a modest 890 shares but word is they were sold in March.

Church bells ring

Celebrations at UBS last night where property mogul Tim Church and his team were inking the biggest direct real estate deal in Australian history, the sale of the Morgan Stanley-owned Investa office portfolio to Chinese sovereign fund CIC for almost $2.5bn.

This flogs the previous record, the $1.4bn Lend Lease paid for a bunch of ING shopping centres in 2009. UBS advised Morgan Stanley, which also tapped its own team to work on the deal.

The portfolio includes stakes in Deutsche Bank’s Sydney HQ and Melbourne’s 120 Collins St.

Ten’s position vacant

If a week is a long time in politics, it is surely an eternity in the media world. Witness Ten spinner Neil Shoebridge on July 20, sternly rebuking Margin Call colleague Sharri Markson for speculating that TV veteran David “Big Wave Dave” Leckie might be in line for the network’s “vacant CEO job”.

“The chief executive role at Ten Network is not vacant,” Shoebridge said, demanding “a correction to your inaccurate and misleading report”.

Just seven days later — yesterday — Ten told the ASX that CEO and chairman Hamish McLennan has stepped down, with Paul Anderson getting the chief exec gig and David Gordon the big chair at the board table.

Apparently McLennan’s loss of the chairman gig was implied at the bottom of page 5 of a press release issued in June. The CEO bit is all new. There’s plenty of time to find a new job for Big Wave Dave: his non-compete with Seven expires next year.

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