Tabcorp’s David Attenborough rates Tatts buy a cert

Illustration: Rod Clement.

Tabcorp boss David Attenborough spoke confidently about his $11.3 billion proposed merger with Tatts yesterday.

It was almost as if his gaming giant wasn’t in a contest with a rival consortium stitched together by the “Vampire Kangaroo”, Macquarie Group.

“We still expect the transaction to complete mid-2017,” Attenborough told investors, ­optimistically, as he released a set of half-year results that sent Tabcorp shares to a six-month low. The stock dropped 5.2 per cent to close at $4.51.

Part of the reason for the ­underwhelming result was the high cost of its pursuit of the Harry Boon-chaired Tatts. Attenborough will hope those fat adviser fees aren’t for nothing.

The stakes are also high over in the camp of the rival bidder for Tatts, the “Pacific consortium” — which is made up of Macquarie with 10 per cent, and Morgan Stanley Infrastructure, US private equity giant KKR and First State Super, each with 30 per cent.

The Macquarie-advised ­Pacific group doesn’t want the Tatts wagering and gaming businesses, which it will spin off via a float or trade sale, possibly even to Tabcorp. They’re after Tatts’ annuity-style lotteries business.

Macquarie banker Michael Burn with Tabcorp CEO David Attenborough at the Spring racing Carnival.

As we’ve noted before, one of the key Macquarie advisers involved is Michael Burn, who until the week before Christmas was chairman of the Victorian Racing Board, one of the most prestigious sporting gigs in ­Melbourne and a helpful position for a networking investment ­banker.

It’s hard to believe Burn stood down from the plum gig unless the Macquarie ensemble was ­serious about the tilt.

Their first pitch was rejected by Boon’s Tatts board. But it could be worth putting some money on Pacific adding to its offer on the other side of Tatts’ half-year result on February 20. Surely Sportsbet’s running odds somewhere.

Women switching off

And there we were thinking that recent departures from chairman Peter Costello’s Nine board were a bad look. Half an hour after the market closed yesterday, Kerry Stokes ’s under-siege Seven West Media announced, in a terse 44-word statement, that director Sheila McGregor had resigned from the board. The partner at law firm Gilbert + Tobin had joined the board in June 2015.

Stokes’s now nine-member SWM board has become even more of a men’s club. It now counts just one, lonely female director, Michelle Deaker, the managing partner of venture capital firm OneVentures.

Michelle Deaker is the last female SWM director. Picture: Renee Nowytarger.

The loss was an appalling look for the media company, coming as it did just before the release of its inquiry into the internal handling of the sex-and-expenses scandal that has enmeshed its chief executive, Tim Worner.

McGregor’s departure has been interpreted by many as a dissenting report on the board’s handling of the sordid affair. It makes for a brutal fall to earth for Seven after a heavenly Australian Open.

Departing female directors have become a notable theme for Australia’s commercial television networks this year.

A fortnight ago, Costello’s Nine surprised many with the announcement that directors Elizabeth Gaines and Holly Kramer were both leaving.

The departures — which are effective as of today — leave Catherine West as the lone female Nine director on the diminutive now four-member board.

Chair David Gordon’s Ten board has become the bastion of gender equality in Australian commercial FTA television: it has an impressive two females on its six-person board: Debbie Goodin and Siobhan McKenna.

Everest looming

Back to horse racing, where sources tell us that the secretive board-level process to select Burn’s replacement as the next chair of the Victorian Racing Club has a little way to run.

John O’Rourke, chairman of property investment outfit Plenary Group and one of the candidates in the race for the prestigious gig, is said to be overseas until later next week.

His showdown with rival candidate Amanda Elliott — the acting chairwoman and ex-wife of businessman and former Liberal Party president John Elliott — could be as early as Friday next week.

The VRC will want to sort the leadership situation out soon, especially after the news of the audacious new $10 million race — “The Everest” — that Peter V’landys’ Racing NSW will hold at Sydney’s Royal Randwick in October.

Singo goes Nats

John Singleton’s political donation record is as erratic as his lunch behaviour. That can happen when you’re worth $416m.

The latest dump from the Australian Electoral Commission shows Singleton donated $100,000 to the NSW division of the National Party in June 2016, a month into the eight-week federal campaign.

It was an unusually orthodox donation for the adman turned radio mogul, publican and horse racer.

Back in 2013, Singo donated $750,000 through his private company OGNIS Pty Ltd to two independent candidates who ran, unsuccessfully, for federal seats on the NSW Central Coast.

In 2012 he tipped $50,000 into Bob Katter’s Australian Party.

So why the conversion to the Nationals this time? It could be that the Nats NSW division was the site of Tony Windsor’s ferocious tilt at party leader Barnaby Joyce’s seat of New England. Joyce is famously chummy with Singo’s good friend, billionaire Gina Rinehart.

Singleton has long been involved in Australian politics. In 1983, the adman created the “Medicare for every Australian” campaign that helped get Bob Hawke’s Labor Party into power.

Thirty-three years later, Singo and the former Labor PM were on opposing sides, as Hawke reprised the role in the infamous “Mediscare” ads for Bill Shorten’s campaign.

Hackett turns Green

Buried in the mess of political donations released this week was a tidy $100,000 from Anna Hackett to Richard Di Natale’s Australian Greens.

Hackett is married to Internode founder Simon Hackett, who was on the board of the National Broadband Network until April 22. Four days after Hackett’s departure from the Turnbull government-controlled board, his wife gave the whopping gift to the Greens. Cause and effect?

In a textbook example of how small corporate Australia is, Hackett was replaced on Ziggy Switkowski’s NBN board by iiNet founder Michael Malone, whose business bought Hackett’s Internode back in 2011.

Lawn disorder

It’s traditionally the juiciest of all plum positions in the Australian diplomatic universe.

But increasingly, ambassador Joe Hockey’s Washington gig looks like a hardship posting.

Joe Hockey at his ambassador's residence, earlier this year.

Last year we wrote about an extraordinary security breach in Hockey’s Washington DC residence.

An only-in-America road rage incident made its way on to Hockey’s lawn. It was followed by a fist fight and ended with one of the two intruders driving his car — Starsky and Hutch-style — through the residence’s closed gates.

Now with Hockey leading the DC efforts to engage Donald Trump’s bellicose regime on the endangered Obama-era deal for America to take refugees from Manus Island and Nauru, that bloody lawn episode must seem like the good old days.