A cosy Italian eatery in Melbourne’s CBD proved the perfect venue last week for about a dozen Macquarie Group alumni to meet, break bread and retell old stories of blockbuster deals fought and won.
Gathering at Italian restaurant Marameo, the former executives of the “millionaires factory” had a wonderful time and the wine did flow, courtesy of former Macquarie Group banker Richard Price, who has turned his delicate city hands from dealmaking to winemaking.
He runs Rill House nestled in Victoria’s cool climate Macedon Ranges, where his wines have won a swag of awards, including his Rill House My Deer Bride 2021 chardonnay recently named the Macedon Ranges’ best wine.
Owned by Price and wife Caroline Aebersold, Rill House has won plenty of fans, from top-end restaurants such as Melbourne’s Flower Drum, Alla Wolf-Tasker’s Lake House in Daylesford, Becco and regional dining gem Brae. It also has been recently offered at top Melbourne dining establishment Gimlet.
Plenty of his former Macquarie pals have signed up as members of his Rill House wine club, and at Macquarie alumni dinners Price brings along the wine to share – hey, what are friends for?
At the dinner last week – held in the lead-up to the Macquarie annual general meeting on Thursday – was current Macquarie CEO Shemara Wikramanayake as well as Wayne Kent, who co-founded Macquarie’s Equity Capital Markets and is now at advisory firm Flagstaff Partners, and Robin Bishop, who is a founding partner at BGH Capital.
Excelsior battle
One of the largest listed cash boxes on the ASX, Sydney-based investor Excelsior Capital, is now facing a battle on two fronts to keep its public listing and sizeable cash reserves out of reach of a gaggle of irate investors who want the tiddler fund liquidated and its cash returned to shareholders.
In two weeks some of those shareholders, led by merchant banker Peter Murrayand corporate lawyer Warwick Sauer, will face off against Excelsior Capital’s largest shareholder, Leanne Catelan, and her chairman, lawyer Danny Herceg.
The general meeting was called by Sauer, a veteran corporate lawyer chairman of investment company Hygrovest, to throw out the Excelsior board, consisting of Herceg and another director, Ryan Mount. However, in a strategic decision, Sauer is not seeking to eject Catelan and, given she owns 51.3 per cent of the company, it’s felt she can defend her right to be on the board, whereas the other two directors, let’s just say, are expendable.
Catelan is doing just fine, having sold her Potts Point, Sydney, grand Italianate mansion “Bomera” to steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta for $34m, and she runs Excelsior Capital as a type of listed investment company.
Sauer is seeking to put on the board David Prescott, the founder and managing director of Lanyon Asset Management and a director of Hygrovest. He is also trying to get elected Luke Cummings, the CEO and lead portfolio manager of Harvest Lane Asset Management.
It should be a fiery general meeting on August 9, when the two sides enter the ring.
It’s not the first time minority shareholders in Excelsior Capital have tried to topple the board, and it probably won’t be the last. But as Catelan, who is the daughter of the late property data mogul and RP Data founder Ray Catelan, owns more than half the company, it is probably doomed to fail.
The second brawl is playing out, more slowly and in a more humdrum style, in the Federal Court, where Murray through his listed investment company London City Equities is claiming oppressive conduct against smaller shareholders and seeking to liquidate Excelsior Capital to return all funds to investors. London City and its ASX-listed stablemate Imperial Pacific have a combined 12 per cent stake in Excelsior Capital, making it the second-largest shareholder behind Catelan.
Affidavits from Murray need to be lodged with the court by August 1 and then Excelsior Capital will need to respond later that month. Murray, a 40-year veteran of the investment game, is concerned Excelsior Capital is turning into a “directionless cash box”.
And what’s the fight over? About $120m in cash and shares, another roughly $30m in franking credits and a listed company that is trading almost 25 per cent below its net tangible assets.
Excelsior Capital has started to put some of that cash to work after it sold an electrical cables business for more than $100m in cash last year. Its latest investment update shows it has put about $20m into “alternative assets managed investment funds” (no further details have been provided). But it is still sitting on $90.5m in cash out of a total investment portfolio worth $116.8m. The company’s market capitalisation is $91m.
Where that remaining cash goes is a major worry for some investors.
Herceg did not return calls to Margin Call.
CrowdStrike hit
Australian-born IT executive Michael Sentonas might just be one of the most powerful Australian bosses in the US tech industry courtesy of his role as the president of embattled cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, but he is also one of Silicon Valley’s biggest losers as the CrowdStrike share price sinks in the wake of the global tech outage it triggered.
CrowdStrike shares have fallen about $US100 since the “blue screen of death” became a thing, tumbling to $US258, down from just under $US350 before the global IT crisis was sparked.
Sentonas holds 411,166 shares in the Texas-based CrowdStrike, meaning his holdings in the company have dropped by $US41m ($63m) in a few short and painful days.
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