They’re whistling Dixie at Seven West Media

Illustration: Rod Clement.

Billionaire Kerry Stokes may have found a blonde-haired ­solution to at least part of his problem with women.

Talk drifting across the Nullarbor is that there’s a fresh candidate in the mix to replace Chris Wharton, the “retired” boss of Seven West Media in Perth.

Word is that Dixie Marshall, the former director of strategic communications for ousted West Australian premier Colin Barnett,has been in dialogue with Seven about a senior role at the company.

Dixie Marshall.

Marshall, 54, is a former commercial television reporter and newsreader turned government adviser. Most of her TV career was spent at Nine, although she has worked at Seven as one of the network’s first female AFL commentators.

Marshall was a controversial figure in Barnett’s office. While not quite achieving Peta Credlin-level controversy, she was accused in parliament of being foul-mouthed and a bully.

One of her final strategic flourishes in the dying days of Barnett’s election campaign was the “Fast Ferry Frenzy”, a madcap plan for Barnett to take journos on a ferry up the Swan River, passing jet-skiing treasurer Mike Nahan and scuba-diving environment minister Albert Jacob. It sounded like a pilot for a new Armando Iannucci show, but was apparently intended to be a showcase of government achievements.

The idea sank like the ­Batavia.

For now Wharton’s role is being filled on an interim basis by Ernst & Young audit partner Philip Teale, while Nick Varigos’s recruitment shop Oppeus International helps with the search.

The role may be split into separate publisher and finance gigs.

That could make room for Marshall and former iiNet exec and West Coast Eagles director Maryna Fewster, who has been inside SWM in Perth for several months running a fine tooth comb through the business.

Maryna Fewster.

The hard-headed Fewster has already been appointed a director of Seven’s Community Newspaper Group, which it co-owns with News Corp.

Where would that leave Brett McCarthy, the long-standing editor of The West Australian?

Sandgropers close to McCarthy — best known on the east coast for an apparent flair for missing political stories about Troy Buswell — believe, as with many editors, he has his own managerial ambitions.

McCarthy was recently given a backrub-in-print by his fawning business editor Ben Harvey. Interestingly, The West Australian ’s booster-in-chief Harvey also came to the defence of Marshall last month.

Seems even that little fella may have got wind of something.

Not so Spotless

Downer Group boss Grant Fenn might find himself with a $1 billion problem if his crazy-brave $1.3bn offer for services group Spotless doesn’t come off.

Grant Fenn.

That sounds like yet another lucrative opportunity for Fenn’s advisers at the Matt Grounds-led local operation of Swiss investment bank UBS.

Downer has already raised $757 million from a fully UBS-underwritten institutional offer to fund the high-risk takeover of Martin Sheppard’s Spotless. That’s the one lobbed a fortnight ago without due diligence and despite question marks in the margins of many hedge funds’ copies of the catering and cleaning company’s accounts.

Just over half of its instos took up the offer.

A subsequent shortfall in the UBS bookbuild cost the bank about $10m.

“Rockstar” Grounds has fully subbed out the underwriting risk associated with Downer’s $254m retail offer.

UBS will get a ballpark fee of about $20m for the whole ECM transaction.

That comes down to about $10m when adjusted for UBS’s insto haircut.

The deal-hungry UBS knows Spotless well, having floated the company for Tim Sims’ private equity shop PEP when it was relisted in 2014. The caterer’s short life back on the ASX has been troubled, as with so many private equity floats.

But, happily for UBS, the ECM fee flow might not be over yet.

Fenn has said that if his Spotless offer fails — and already the company is privately acknowledging that it grossly underestimated the level of shareholder disaffection with the unloved Spotless — he’ll give the $1bn in capital raised back to investors. Less the $20m paid to the hardworking UBS, of course.

If that capital return is done via an on-market buyback, that could give Grounds and his team a third clip of the Spotless-related ticket. Good money, but a terrible look.

Packer the backer

Billionaire James Packer has further integrated his ex-wife Jodhi Meares’ fashion retailer The Upside Corporation into his private business operations, moving one of his long-serving Consolidated Press lawyers in as a key administrator for the sportswear group.

Packer was married to former bikini model Meares for three years until 2002. The pair remain close. Packer took a 20 per cent stake in Meares’ fashion business last year.

Jodhi Meares and James Packer.

Now he has moved in ConPress lawyer (not Superman’s love interest) Louise Lane as The Upside’s company secretary, relieving Meares of the administrative duties. Lane has worked for the Crown billionaire for more than a decade.

The change comes amid speculation that Meares, 46, has split from her husband of just over a year, twenty-something Melbourne photographer Nicholas Tsindos.

Meares was Packer’s first wife before he married Erica Baxter,with whom he shares three children. Late last year he broke off his engagement to pop star Mariah Carey.

Packer invested in the fashion enterprise alongside his friend Arnon Milchan, who also took a 20 per cent stake. Meares retains the 60 per cent balance.

Packer is represented in The Upside board by the head of brands at his ConsPress, Sam McKay, while Milchan is represented by his Los Angeles-based son Yariv Milchan.

With the assistance of long-serving lieutenants John Alexander and Guy Jalland, Packer has been unsentimentally liquidating assets across his empire.

The Upside integration — like the NRL’s Rabbitohs quarantining — suggests some things are off limits to Packer’s razor gang.

Book your ticket

For the third time, Menzies enterprise brain Andrew Bragg has launched his free-trade book Fit for Service. Next week, Tasmania!

Former Liberal trade minister Andrew Robb did the honours at yesterday’s Sydney launch, which was held in NAB’s corporate tower in the very room in which ANZ last week snubbed Australian Bankers’ Association boss Anna Bligh. You could still sense the awkwardness.

But Robb wasn’t hung up on that. His attention was squarely on the good work of aspiring Liberal politician Bragg.

Andrew Bragg, left, with Tony Shepherd and Andrew Robb.

“I’m told he’s fast becoming the thinking woman’s sex symbol,” Robb told the gathered, who included Menzies director Tony Shepherd, Virgin Australia director Rob Thomas and richie Michael Crouch, the distinguished gentleman behind the Zip water heater business Chris Hadley’s Quadrant Private Equity is now trying to flog.

Absent was Menzies executive director Nick Cater, who was instead in his lycra cycling near the Snowy Mountains with Tony Abbott and Kevin Andrews. Did Cater lose a bet?

Back to Robb, who in addition to his portfolio of post-political commercial roles has been the lead author of a review into the Liberal Party’s underwhelming, but ultimately victorious, 2016 federal election campaign.

Robb was silent on the subject yesterday, but as we flagged last week the report is now in the hands of outgoing Liberal federal president Richard Alston, who is expected to share it with his federal executive on Friday.