Team Scurrah nabs QIC contract; Maquarie boss can sleep easy
Nicole Scurrah has slapped together the rudiments of a website for her latest corporate play, Create Advisory, just a month after walking out on Luke Sayers over their supposedly irreconcilable differences – namely his exposure to the PwC tax scandal.
As we reported at the time, Scurrah resigned as a partner at Sayers Group and ostensibly pulled a Jerry Maguire (“Who’s coming with me?”) by luring several members of staff from the Queensland office, and succeeding for the most part. A couple ended up staying behind.
Create Advisory has only been registered for a couple of weeks but the good word is that its incoming client is QIC, the $100bn fund manager owned by the Queensland government. Recall that Scurrah was a chief of staff to Queensland Labor premier Anna Bligh, so forgive us for wondering if there isn’t a bit of the old Labor backscratch about this arrangement.
After all, Scurrah still has good friends in parliament, including Shannon Fentiman, now the Health Minister, who benefited from free accommodation at Scurrah’s ski lodge in Canada in 2019, as did former deputy premier Jackie Trad, who once hired Scurrah as a consultant to help the government cut some fat out of, yep, consulting contracts.
That was when Scurrah worked at PwC and was later plucked out by Sayers in 2020 to join his newly-created firm. And while she cited the PwC tax scandal as a blight on Sayers Group – and her reason for quitting – Margin Call understands her plans to bid adieu were plotted well before PwC became the talk of the town.
Peace and quiet
Macquarie’s Shemara Wikramanayake seems to have dodged another bullet on some pesky home renovations – not her own, but those of neighbours who were angling for a $2.4m do-up on the block adjoining hers in the harbour enclave of Vaucluse.
The head of the Millionaires’ Factory owns a two-storey pile at the front of a battle-axe block, the back-end of which was purchased by property developer Jing Wang and her son William Wenhao Wu for $7.4m in 2021.
That was during a spending spree of $100m flicked out on trophy homes in a period of five months.
Plans were lodged for a three-storey rebuild on the site but the council tarried and by September 2022 there still hadn’t been any word on whether the works could go ahead.
Unsurprisingly, the developers put the home back on the market (for $11m), then took it off again when no buyer could be found.
And now, even though the council has finally approved the plans, they’ve decided to rent the home for something like $2500 per week instead.
So no need for the dozers, no noise, and Wang gets a go at paying off the mortgage. It’s with NAB, mind.
Pack your bags
We were needlessly circumspect in our description on Wednesday of a lawsuit being brought against Scale Facilitation CEO David Collard, now allegedly an apartment-squatter, in the New York Supreme Court.
Documents filed say that Collard is clearly en route to being evicted from his splendidly luxurious Midtown Manhattan apartment by its owner, Chinese billionaire and art collector Liu Yiqian, a quirky chap who bootstrapped his way to fortune by starting out driving a Shanghai cab.
“Eviction case against tenant” is what the papers say, noting that Collard hasn’t engaged a lawyer yet. This is what happens when tenants don’t pay their $US75,000 in monthly rent on time, let alone the money owed to Scale’s staff and contractors. No need to count chief operating officer Mike Winn among them anymore, for he seems to have gotten jack of Collard and resigned in recent weeks, barely six months into his tenure. That’s actually a decent stint in the lifespan of employee contracts at Scale.
The filings make it plain that Collard has been living in the apartment Liu purchased for himself on the 62nd floor of One57, a glass tower super-scraper with startling views of the city, and the kind of address where the neighbours could be a Guggenheim or an Astor. Liu paid $US23.5m for it in 2016. Sounds like Collard might have to flop it with one of his mates for a while.
Water feature
The ground floor redevelopment of Melbourne’s most prestigious corporate address, 101 Collins Street, caused an 18-month inconvenience to the building’s hot-shot tenants.
Finally, however, a resolution.
Thankfully, there’s no further need for anyone to endure the famous bum sculptures that were on prominent display in the foyer. As the building’s art curator Emily Cormack herself conceded, the new works “will better represent the essence of the building”. Perhaps the arses might find a home in one of the nation’s parliaments, then?
Alas, not everyone is pleased. Replacing the sculptures are a series of ponds fitted with irritating alarms to stop the bankers and lawyers from getting sloshed with water as they’re whanging on about whatever into their mobile phones. Apparently it’s nearly happened a couple of times. Even the cleaners are setting off the alarms when they get too close.
More wrongs than rights at the AHRC?
A case of curious priorities over at the Australian Human Rights Commission where hand-picked appointee Giridharan Sivaraman seems to prefer playing politics over action on anti-Semitism.
Freehills partner given notice over synagogue tweet
Herbert Smith Freehills leaders have voted to remove one of its longstanding partners, Damien Hazard, over a ‘deeply offensive’ tweet targeting Jeremy Leibler.