Roxy’s BFF buys Aitkens’ harbourside pad

Stockbroker Charlie Aitken and wife Ellie. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Fund manager couple Charlie and Ellie Aitken will settle the sale of their Darling Point trophy home at the end of September.

The $10 million-plus deal will unlock handy spending money for the glamour pair as their fledgling Aitken Investment Management finds its feet in a competitive market for funds under management.

The couple had been seeking $14 million for the Sydney harbourside mansion, which is mortgaged to Macquarie Bank.

The sale comes after we revealed that Aitken had only managed to secure $75 million — a quarter of the $300 million that he had been originally seeking when he launched the fund in 2015.

His base performance fee is 1.5 per cent, which doesn’t buy much eastern suburbs lifestyle. A good reason for Charlie to outperform the market to earn bonus fees — as he did, comfortably, in May.

Eastern suburbs chatter that the pair were US bound seems unfounded.

The young entrepreneurs — and their children — are tied to Sydney for sometime yet as they grow the business.

And the new owners of Chez Aitken?

If you can believe it, they make the outgoing occupants look beige ...

The new Aitkens

Moving in are emergency financier Tim Odillo Maher and his fashionista partner Victoria Montano.

Odillo Maher has got pedigree. He went to the same private Catholic school as Oliver Curtis (and Tony Abbott), Riverview, and used to work at besieged big four bank ANZ. But he is now executive director of crisis lending house Fox Symes, which is chaired by former Joh Bjelke-Petersen Attorney-General Sam Doumany.

Tim Odillo Maher and Victoria Montano.

Meanwhile, Victoria runs a children’s online designer boutique. Not a world away from the online luxe business Ellie Aitken ran before funds management called. The couple have one son, who is often dressed to match his father.

Last week they slapped a caveat on their new home, but it’s all friendly. The Aitkens are social acquaintances of the Odillo Mahers.

But it’s Victoria’s inner circle that is really interesting ...

Company she keeps

Victoria Montano is tight with Roxy Jacenko, the wife of insider trader Oliver Curtis (who is now a bit over a week away from sentencing). The neighbourly couples live in the same North Bondi boutique apartment block, which overlooks the beach.

Indeed, it was Montano who delivered Jacenko a home-cooked roast chicken dinner as Curtis’s NSW Supreme Court trial kicked off last month, and joined Roxy and daughter Pixie Curtis on a recent trip to Japan.

We are sure Montano will be back rapping on the front door today, as Jacenko celebrates her 36th birthday.

The Odillo Mahers loved their beach pad so much they were understood to have considered buying the penthouse when it was put on the market late last year by the block’s developer, film producer Rebel Penfold-Russell.

They are also believed to have visited the up-for-sale $10 million-odd home of medical entrepreneur Peter Gregg and his wife Elaine on Tivoli Avenue at Rose Bay. But it needed more work than the Aitkens’ Darling Point home.

In the end, the penthouse on the beach was sold to a company associated with Beverly Hills-based Hollywood money manager Howard Altman. There was speculation he was buying for Naomi Watts or Hugh Jackman.

Seems we can solve that eastern suburbs riddle as well. Yesterday, Jackman’s producer, activist and actress wife Deborra-Lee Furness was on the top floor of the building enjoying her $5.9 million view.

So much for Wolverine’s quiet Sydney bolthole.

Do it for Malcolm

It’s all happening this week if you’re part of Sydney’s eastern suburbs glitterati.

Tomorrow night, the Sydney Children’s Hospital Foundation will hold its 19th annual Gold Dinner in a tent at Moore Park’s Entertainment Quarter to be hosted by Nine’s Deborah Knight and Peter Stefanovic.

And two days later Merivale boss Justin Hemmes is hosting a knees up at The Hermitage, his Gothic harbourside mansion in Vaucluse, to raise money for local member Malcolm Turnbull.

The PM’s good friend and Seven commercial director, Bruce McWilliam, sent out the email invitation for the “small gathering” in his idiosyncratic style.

“Everyone knows how hopeless and compromised billion dollar Bill Shorten is. We need to get behind Malcolm,” McWilliam wrote. “As was said of Skye Leckie by Malcolm, put the party back into Liberal Party.”

The night will cost $10,000 a head or $12,000 for a couple. The Gold Dinner is in the order of $1500 a head.

McWilliam made the case: “That is money well spent to return our PM. Think how much shorten wld (sic) cost you apart from the distaste (and impact on our health and demeanour) if we see that grub representing our great nation and polluting our airwaves.”

Still not convinced? “A refusal will offend. Do something great for your country. Cheers Bruce.”

Grounds for optimism

Estia Health may be under the pump — falling another 2 per cent yesterday — but we can see another reason why its house broker UBS remains bullish on the aged care sector.

The boss of the Swiss bank’s Australian operations Matt Grounds has skin in the game in the form of his personal stake in the private, burgeoning aged care provider Arrum Holdings, which operates about 1000 beds in NSW and Victoria.

UBS chief executive, Matthew Grounds. Picture: Britta Campion.

And he’s got some old banker friends to join him on the register. Arrum — which has about 400 staff — is chaired by former UBS banker David Di Pilla, who now (by virtue of marriage) helps manage the wealth of the Salteri family.

Along with turning soil on new projects for the group and smiling broadly in pics, Di Pilla has a big lick of Arrum, as does UBS’s capital markets chair Robbie Vanderzeil.

The business is less than two years old, is run out an office in Double Bay and is one of the fastest growing providers.

UBS was one of the banks that floated Estia, which is now the subject of a Health Department audit as patient funding skyrockets.

Man with the money

Less than two weeks ago insurance comparison business Compare the Market dramatically reorganised its Australian executive ranks.

With the precision of a South African big game hunter, chief executive Matt McCann and chief operating officer Jo Thomas were removed from the business, which is best known for an ad campaign that features a velvet-clad meerkat. Both were refugees from rival online insurance comparison business, the Chris Knoblanche-chaired iSelect.

We can now reveal the new leader of the Australian meerkats: Ram Kangatharan, who was previously the chief operating officer at Bank of Queensland. He left the bank in 2012 after the board made Stuart Grimshaw its new chief executive.

Kangatharan is also the Australian head of Auto & General Insurance (A&G), a company that underwrites a fair whack of the brands that Compare the Market is supposed to price. Those brands include Budget Direct and Virgin Money.

Using the language of the African savanna, some onlookers in the industry reckon the poacher has been made the gamekeeper.

But the appointment shouldn’t surprise. The money behind both A&G and Compare is the megalomaniacal South African billionaire Douw Steyn.

The 64-year-old has a fortune valued at £700 million (about $1.4 billion), according to The Sunday Times Rich List.

In 2012 Steyn paid £63 million for a townhouse on London’s ritzy Belgrave Square.

And he is currently building Steyn City (its real name), a gated community that sits north of Johannesburg and, to go by the advertorial material, must be just about the whitest pocket of the country.

In the middle of this gated city sits Steyn’s primary South African residence, “Palazzo Steyn”, a Romanesque construction worthy of a modern day Nero.

Douw Steyn’s Pallazo Steyn in the middle of the Steyn City development north of Johannesburg