Punter Ricky Ponting turns pro as a Crownbet bookie

Cartoon: Rod Clement.

Life after cricket just got a bit richer for former Australia captain Ricky Ponting.

Company records obtained by Margin Call show the son of Tasmania has joined the registry of online gambling outfit CrownBet Holdings.

Ricky Ponting

His transformation from Punter to bookie is complete. In recent weeks, Ponting has been given a 1 per cent stake in the outfit. The filings give the stake a paper value of $1.4 million.

Ponting, the strikingly thin face of the outfit being rebranded as BetEasy, joins a cast of CrownBet execs and rich backers on the register. They are founder Matt Tripp, Catherine Tripp, company director Grant Griffiths, executives Nicholas Tyshing and Tom Carroll and former Sportsbet exec John ­McDonald.

The cricketer’s shares are held in his vehicle R. P. 96 Pty Ltd, a company founded in 1996, the year after his tremendously successful international cricket career began.

BetEasy is the product of a merger of CrownBet with the former Australian operations of British gaming giant William Hill, which were scooped up last year for $300 million.

Its major shareholder is the $5 billion, Rafael Ashkenazi-led Canadian online poker and gambling giant The Stars Group, which has an 80 per cent stake.

The other 20 per cent is split between Tripp, Punter and the rest.

If they clear performance hurdles set by their Canadian backers, they could earn a reported combined payment of $US182m in cash and shares in 2020.

Plenty of incentive for Ponting to keep spreading the word.

Giles out of favour

Former Northern Territory chief minister Adam Giles’ media career is in sorry shape right now.

And what of Giles’s other post-political projects?

In January 2017, Giles followed the path cleared by former Liberal warrior Sophie Mirabella and joined the payroll of iron ore billionaire Gina Rinehart.

Gina Rinehart at Port Hedland.

With a fortune last valued at $12.7 billion, if Rinehart wants two former conservative pollies on her payroll, Rinehart gets two former conservative pollies on her payroll.

But that mostly came to an end in May this year, as Giles began his television show on Sky News.

At the time, it was reported that Giles had left Rinehart’s Hancock empire, where he had been working as the “general manager of external affairs for pastoral”, which included responsibility for the billionaire’s expanding cattle empire.

Corporate filings show the relationship is ongoing.

Giles continues as an alternate director on S. Kidman & Co Pty Ltd, the company that controls the enormous pastoral empire that Sidney Kidman founded in 1899 and which Rinehart, along with Chinese billionaire Gui Guojie, bought in late 2016 after a tangled sales process.

Sources familiar with Australia’s largest cattle property tell Margin Call that Giles’s position on the board is all but over.

“It just hasn’t been formalised,” said a source.

The Kidman board includes Rinehart, Guojie, former trade minister Andrew Robb and for now, as an alternate director, Giles.

Cbus dodges a bullet

It was not a great day for Australia’s retail funds or their Liberal Party backers at Kenneth Hayne’sroyal commission yesterday.

The baby-faced assassin Michael Hodge began the highly anticipated superannuation fortnight of hearings by revealing that the Steve Bracks-chaired, CFMEU-aligned industry giant Cbus has been given a leave pass. As Hodge explained, for all the pre-hearing speculation about industry fund union rorts, the Cbus case study just wasn’t worth the time … not, in his opinion, compared to the sins of the big four bank-owned retail funds and their for-profit fellow travellers.

The retail funds have plenty of questions to answer. Just ask NAB’s new head of corporate affairs Jason Laird, who was in the crowd at the Federal Court yesterday to keep an eye on Hodge’s first target, NAB executive Paul Carter.

Carter, who previously ran the bank’s super division and now runs the bank’s Kiwi subsidiary Bank of New Zealand, was asked, for hours, and hours, about the bank’s tangled fee structure. In one instance, customers were charged a fee, unless they asked not to be charged, in which case it was waived.

It sounded like the sort of behaviour the industry funds have long accused their for-profit rivals of.

Hodge also revealed there would be a thorough examination of one of the industry funds’ more innovative uses of their members’ money: the online website The New Daily.

That case study will provide an interesting journalistic assignment for the site’s editor Patrick Elligett, who has taken over the day-to-day running of things since founding editor Bruce Guthrie pulled back.

“We will cover the superannuation round of the royal commission with the same diligence we have applied to all of the proceedings so far,” Elligett told us. “At least one of our journalists has been assigned to every day of the commission.”

Good to hear.

From stir to Sofitel

After last week’s drama, it was a relief to learn ClearView director David Brown made it along yesterday to Brisbane’s Sofitel for the 2018 Business Advantage Papua New Guinea Investment Conference.

Brown, the chief investment officer of PNG’s National Superannuation Fund, which manages about $1.85bn, spent the beginning of last week in a jail in Port Moresby on bizarre fraud charges that Margin Call understands are likely to wither away.

Despite all of last week’s intrigue, Brown was asked only about investing in our near neighbour during yesterday’s appearance. Not a word on his peculiar week, which seems a bit incurious.