Terry Snow rains on Canberra airport’s big day

Illustration: Rod Clement.

Putting aside the bucketing rain and a medical emergency, yesterday’s internationalisation of Terry Snow’s Canberra Airport couldn’t have gone better.

It was all celebrations in the capital as it welcomed — at 8.03am — Singapore Airlines’ first international flight to the city on a beautiful spring day (heavy rain with a top of 9C).

Canberra Airport welcomed Singapore Airlines’ first international flight to the city yesterday.

Not since the short-lived flights to Nadi by Air Pacific (now Fiji Airways) in 2004 has the airport received a commercial international flight.

ACT chief minister Andrew Barr (who goes to an election next month and is expected to win a fifth term for the public service republic’s indestructible Labor government) was along to toast its arrival.

Water cannons sprayed Singapore’s Boeing 777-200ER, although you had to squint to see them through the pouring rain.

Snow — easily Canberra’s richest person with a fortune of $685 million — was on board the historic flight with wife Ginette.

After a brief stop, they were back on board the plane to ­continue the trip to springtime in Wellington (cloudy with a top of 10C).

Tapping out at the halfway mark was the passenger involved in the new route’s first medical crisis, who suffered fainting spells on the way to Canberra.

As a result, the already impressive welcoming party expanded to include a medical team, who attended to the passenger. The airline says all is now OK.

If you can believe it, those keenly watching the new service reckon it’s going to be a tough sell for Singapore Airlines boss Goh Choon Phong, particularly the second leg across the ditch.

Singapore says the sales so far have been “encouraging” but rival estimates have the Canberra to Wellington route at 30 per cent capacity over the next four months.

Wonder how they’ll go when the Canberra frost is out.

Peace, bro

It is the most impressive breakout of peace since Belfast’s Good Friday Agreement.

The late billionaire turned prisoner Alan Bond.

Followers of junior exploration company Atrum Coal may remember that the company’s stellar start to corporate life — it was the ASX’s best-performed IPO of the 2013 financial year — was soon followed by a legal brawl between its three founding directors.

Jeremy Bond, a key investor in Atrum Coal and MetalsTech, and grandson of Alan Bond.

Young executives Russell Moran and Gino D’Anna, along with their chairman James Chisholm and key investor Jeremy Bond (grandson of the late billionaire turned prisoner Alan Bond) all made paper fortunes as Atrum shares climbed from 20c to more than $2 during its first year on the board.

But the goodwill between the trio evaporated faster than the Atrum share price during an ugly 2015. The stock slid and Chisholm started to fear that Moran and D’Anna could be forced to sell down big chunks of their holdings.

This led to an extraordinary situation where Atrum went to court seeking action against its own executives in a search for clarity over margin loans linked to their stakes. Moran and D’Anna left soon after.

More court drama followed when the pair launched a new venture based right on the doorstep of Atrum’s flagship anthracite project in Canada.

Writs were issued, laptops were seized, insults flew.

Incredibly, we can reveal the foursome are back in business together.

Both Chisholm and Bond are putting cash into Moran and D’Anna’s new lithium exploration play MetalsTech, which is looking to list on the ASX later this year.

Bond will emerge as a major shareholder.

The sudden benevolence is going both ways. Both Moran and D’Anna are going to be in Sydney next week to vote their remaining Atrum shares in favour of its proposed investment into Atlantic Carbon.

Whoever sorted out the mess should head to the Middle East next. Mending its millennia of bad suddenly looks possible.

Right of reply

Federal Liberal director Tony Nutt addresses the National Press Club today for his “Campaign Director’s 2016 Election Review”.

Federal Liberal director Tony Nutt. Picture: Gary Ramage.

The knives of the unsourced (always the first drawn) have been set on Nutt for his running of Malcolm Turnbull’s marathon eight-week campaign.

Nutt only took over from his predecessor Brian Loughnane in December, so it was always going to be a tricky assignment. It recalls the joke Nutt’s current boss Turnbull likes to tell about a tourist seeking directions to Dublin who is told: “I wouldn’t start from here.”

It will be interesting to hear what Nutt says about the organisational state of the Liberal Party and its finances.

Money was a huge problem for the Liberals, underlined in red by Turnbull’s personal donation of more than $2m.

One of the reasons for this was the ICAC-ravaged NSW Liberal division, which Nutt was dropped into — special ops style — in late 2014 ahead of Mike Baird’s successful 2015 campaign.

The NSW Liberals had $4.3m in public funding withheld by the NSW Electoral Commission because of their failure to properly account for more than $690,000 of donations — a fairly major headache for Nutt as he tried to fund a seemingly endless national campaign.

We have heard that that situation — now the responsibility of Nutt’s successor as NSW Liberal state director, Chris Stone — is likely to be resolved in the next few weeks — only four months too late to be of any help to Nutt and his maligned campaign team.

Meanwhile, Kent Johns — a water treatment businessman, Sutherland Shire councillor and knockabout member of the state’s dominant Left faction — has been appointed the acting head of the NSW Liberal division, replacing the Member for North Sydney Trent Zimmerman.

The NSW state executive is now organising the process to appoint a permanent replacement.

Can you believe the party is yet to be swamped with interest by figures well connected to the Sydney business community?

Man of the moment

This month keeps getting bigger for Moelis boss and Sydney Swans chair Andrew Pridham.

Sydney Swans chair Andrew Pridham. Picture: Jason McCawley/Getty Images.

Tomorrow his Swans play Geelong at the MCG for a spot in the AFL grand final.

The Swans are set to play for a spot in the AFL grand final. Picture: Sarah Reed.

That game comes three weeks after the red-and-white investment banker got hitched to his long-term partner and former fellow banker Carolyn Gilchrist in a morning ceremony attended by close family at the pair’s Palm Beach holiday home.

The happy occasion was followed in the evening by a party, also at home, to celebrate Pridham’s milestone 50th birthday, which was attended by family and friends drawn from business and footy.

The couple already have a young daughter together. Gilchrist and Pridham worked together in their careers at UBS and JPMorgan. Gilchrist is now forging a career as a non-executive director.

The couple live in Mosman on a sprawling estate just up the road from Taronga Zoo, near the home of former UBS exec Matt Hanning.

Head of UBS in Australia Matt Grounds recently replaced Hanning as the Swiss investment bank’s head of its Asia division, a job he has done previously.

Cryptically, Hanning is now publicly saying that he is “gardening”, with talk suggesting he has already secured a new role back in Sydney.

We understand it is not the presidency of the NSW Liberal Party.