Scott Morrison to head new FIRB posse

Illustration: Rod Clement.

With foreign investment such a hot topic right now, Malcolm Turnbull’s government has come up with new ministerial ­arrangements for handling FIRB decisions.

Treasurer Scott Morrison will continue to take carriage of all the big and potentially politically hot transactions — NSW poles and wires top of the list, and with the likes of the Port of Melbourne coming down the line and the Kidman pastoral sale bubbling along.

ScoMo’s fellow cabinet member, Revenue and Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer, will have a pared-back suite of FIRB duties, looking after agriculture, while the Nationals’ ­Michael McCormack, who is Small Business Minister (and yesterday fully occupied with the Census debacle), will handle everything else.

O’Dwyer’s restricted portfolio is believed to go towards managing any perceived conflicts of interest that might arise thanks to her hubbie Jon Mant’s position as an executive director at investment bank UBS.

Mant has only recently returned to the Melbourne office of UBS after a period at home on parental leave from the Swiss bank taking care of the couple’s first child, Olivia, born in May last year.

Marathon effort

Billionaire Gina Rinehart is setting what can only be described as a cracking pace in Rio.

As the patron of no less than four Olympic sports — swimming, volleyball, synchronised swimming and rowing — she is covering all corners of the South American city and all of the clock enthusiastically cheering on our athletes.

With her right-hand man Hancock Prospecting executive director Tad Watroba in tow, Rinehart — who we can report is even an honorary member of the synchronised swimming team — is braving security, long lines and traffic jams to take in all the action.

Rinehart, looking fit, relaxed and happy, has been spotted all over Rio, but her efforts began way before the Games started, having hosted Aussie athletes at dinners in the outback and given them tours of her mega iron ore mine in the Pilbara, Roy Hill.

Whispers are that the fresh spring in Rinehart’s step just might be due to a fresh romance, possibly with a younger man, for the already twice-married 62-year-old daughter of the late Lang Hancock.

Paper riches

Things are really working out at Fairfax for its newest director, Patrick Allaway.

The investment banker joined the Nick Falloon-chaired media company board in April after working as a consultant to Fairfax for the past three years.

In that time Allaway, who was a long-serving banker with Citi but more recently has run his own shop, Saltbush Capital, pocketed more than $450,000 in consultancy fees from Fairfax.

Yesterday Fairfax chief Greg Hywood unveiled an $890 million bottom-line loss.

Hywood now lives in a luxury Darlinghurst apartment set in The Residence overlooking Sydney’s Hyde Park, after he formally relocated his home from Melbourne.

Keeping things tight, Hywood bought that apartment from Allaway and Allaway’s wife Elizabeth for $4.1m after the Allaways bought a new abode in Mosman. The Allaways originally paid $2.8m, with Hywood delivering the then Fairfax consultant a sweet capital gain.

As well as racking up a loss on the books, Hywood has also suffered a fresh loss in the courts, with JusticeLucy McCallum finding against Fairfax and journalist Peter FitzSimons in a defamation case brought by a specialist in “restoring vibrational frequency”, sports nutritionist Sean Carolan, over a story involving the Sydney Roosters rugby league team.

McCallum, who has recently presided over the Oliver Curtis insider trading case, Don Voelte’s failed defo case against the ABC and shortly the Angus Aitken ANZ action, awarded $300,000 to Carolan.

Price of economics

Malcolm Turnbull’s newly appointed chairman of the lower house economics committee, David Coleman, has already paid a price for what he would be hoping is his high-profile new gig.

Coleman, who joined the parliament in 2013 from a strategy role at Nine with then boss David Gyngell, has held NAB shares since 2006, when they were trading at about $35 each.

Since then he’s ridden the NAB rollercoaster down to about $16 each, up to a recent peak of near $40 and then back to about $25 a share on Monday, which is when his office says he flogged his bank stock after being told of his new economics committee chairmanship on the weekend.

Member for Banks Coleman will be hoping the loss he’s now crystallised from the decade-long investment will be outweighed by his new career-making opportunity.

Narev’s defence

Commonwealth Bank boss Ian Narev came out swinging yesterday in defence of his mild-mannered chief number cruncher David Craig, who since March has been moonlighting as a $160,000-a-year non-executive director at Lend Lease.

Craig, who has been CFO since September 2006, last year got $6.5m to count Narev’s dollars and cents, but after so long at the bank his boss flashed him the green light to expand his professional development in a “governance” capacity.

But stakeholders, including CSLA’s veteran analyst Brian Johnson, are worried Craig may not be giving his all to CBA, that Narev should be thinking about CFO succession planning and that perhaps fees paid by the David Crawford-chaired Lend Lease should be clawed back by the bank.

“I wouldn’t describe any of my executives as part-time and, if I were, he (Craig) wouldn’t be one of them,” Narev defended.

Long distance call

Woolies new big-ticket corporate affairs boss Jenny James, who starts at Bella Vista in early October from PepsiCo in Hong Kong, doesn’t quite seem to have her head around her imminent transition.

James wasn’t keen for a friendly chat yesterday when we called to hear how excited she was about coming back to Oz and the prospect of her new gig with Woolies boss Brad Banducci.

(Sadly, she won’t report to the boss, but rather to corporate counsel Richard Dammery.)

From her desk in Hong Kong James, who’s also spruiked for Unilever and L’Oreal, quickly told us she had “to step away from the phone”, probably to get on with packing up her desk.

Meanwhile we hear James wasn’t the only exec sounded out for the lucrative role, with Alan Joyce’s right-hand lady at Qantas, Olivia Wirth,high up on the Woolies wish list.