Radek Sali’s island retreat soothes Made woes

Cartoon: Rod Clement

Life’s moving on for Swisse vitamins millionaire Radek Sali.

The Melbourne entrepreneur has been spending time on UK billionaire Richard Branson’s luxury Necker Island, part of the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean.

That’s one way to recover from a multi-million-dollar corporate failure.

Sali, of course, was a major shareholder in celebrity chef George Calombaris’s now collapsed Made Establishment, which is no longer trading and next week is expected to be tipped into receivership.

Sali has just been on Necker for a charity event, which we are told had been organised a year ago.

“Mr Sali is a board member and supporter of Igniting Change, a 20-year-old charity that was part of an event on Necker Island to raise funds to help the charity provide opportunities for indigenous young people and disadvantaged and vulnerable Australians,” a spokesman for Sali’s Light Warrior group told us.

Over the lapping waves, Margin Call suspects, Sali couldn’t hear the lament of Made’s 400-odd staff, who are owed $1.34m in outstanding entitlements and are awaiting news from next week’s second creditors meeting on whether they will soon be able to access the government’s Federal Entitlement Guarantee to claim what they are owed.

Made’s creditors more generally have done $21.5m on the Calombaris and Sali-controlled Made. Unsecured creditors are not expected to see any return from the wind-up process, while secured creditor the Commonwealth Bank, which is owed $8m, is predicted to get just $1m back.

Melbourne-based venture capitalist Sali tipped a total of $11.5m into Made, including $310,000 two days before he placed the company into administration on February 10.

In the days before Made collapsed he also registered as a secured creditor, a status that has now been deemed “void” by administrator Korda Mentha.

Bell tolls

As the leviathan legal action around the collapse of the late Alan Bond’s Bell Group lurches towards a close, a few people at stricken Seven West Media may be thinking about what might have been.

In particular, as concerns grow about the company’s debt levels and plunging share price, they may be looking longingly at a big Bell Group payday that once could have been coming their way.

After more than two decades of litigation stemming from the collapse of Bell Group, its remaining creditors — those that helped fund the mammoth litigation — are closing on an agreement to divvy up the estimated $1.9bn available in the pool, won in the courts from the banks that stripped more than $280m in its assets after appointing receivers in 1991.

Among those are veteran WA businessmen Danny Hill and Wayne Bowen, and the family of the late Brian Coppin — through their joint venture company WA Glendinning & Associates, which also boasts litigation funder Hugh McLernon as a director.

Along with the ATO, the WA government and companies associated with Dutch distressed debt buyer Louis Reijtenbach, they remain in the mix for a big slice of the pie when agreement is finally reached, likely in the next few months. WA Glendinning bought an estimated $183m worth of debt from Bell Group’s receivers when they sold the company’s publishing arm into the 1991 float of WA Newspapers, owner of The West Australian newspaper, which promptly crystallised the loss and took advantage of the resulting tax credits as the economy recovered in the early 1990s.

That was undoubtedly a sound business strategy at the time. But with times as difficult as they are, there must surely be a few historically minded eyes at Seven West Media, now the owner of The West, looking longingly at the slice of the Bell Group pie it gave up three decades ago.

Even a slice of the $183m owed to WA Glendinning would go a long way to easing some of stress caused by the company’s $683m worth of borrowings.

And $183m is, of course, more than the entire $162m market capitalisation of SWM when its shares hit an all-time low of 10.5c on Tuesday.

Broker’s virus scare

Stockbroking firm Bell Potter Securities is the latest ASX-listed entity to be rattled by a coronavirus scare. The firm cancelled all client meetings yesterday.

Margin Call understands it centres on a possible contagion within the private wealth desk headed by financial adviser Les Owen. He has been tested, although the Bellevue Hill stockbroker has not been abroad. He does have wealthy clients who visit Sydney on private jets, and he did have dinner last weekend with Tom Hanks.

Without formal notification, some staff turned up to their Aurora Place workplace to find it pretty much vacated. And not because the stockmarket was again apocalyptic with Bell Potter’s own share price down almost 10 per cent.

Seems much of the work from home was staff-initiated given company secretary Cindy Jane-Lee is on holidays.

With an office cleanse now required, Bell Potter, led by Alistair Provan and Colin Bell, has more than 300 advisers across a network of 12 offices in Australia, along with London and Hong Kong offices. Owen’s been around long enough to have almost seen it all, having been featured in his youth on the front pages after the Black Monday 1987 crash.

Rosamond for trial

Helen Rosamond is set to stand trial in the NSW District Court mid-next month, accused of defrauding National Australia Bank of millions of dollars.

The matter concerning Rosamond, a former director of The Human Group, was yesterday back in the Downing Centre Local Court where she was committed for trial.

These include dishonestly obtaining a benefit by deception and corruptly giving an agent benefit, with an alleged total value of $26.7m.

Rosamond’s not guilty plea is in contrast to that of her alleged co-conspirator Rosemary Rogers, who last month pleaded guilty to a reduced list of 38 charges of dishonestly obtaining financial benefit by deception.

Rogers, who is on bail and living in Bellbrae not far from Bells Beach on Victoria’s surf coast, is now awaiting sentencing. She is scheduled to be back in court at the end of this month.

Rosamond’s trial in the NSW District Court is set to begin on April 17.