Tony Abbott’s mate needs to dish out tax advice

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It’s nice to know that former PM Tony Abbott still has friends in high places all over the world.

After his trip to Ukraine last month to visit President Petro Poroshenko, Tones popped over to London for four days on the purse of his old friend, Aussie billionaire Sir Michael Hintze.

Hintze, said to be worth $1.8 billion, runs the CQS hedge fund empire and is a big donor to conservative politics.

In 2013, he dropped $75,000 into the Liberal kitty to help unseat Kevin Rudd, and the following year Joe Hockey appointed Hintze to a government advisory panel. Closing the circle, Abbott is in turn on a panel for Poroshenko.

So perhaps Hintze could help Poroshenko out with tax advice. The Ukrainian is in the spotlight after being named in the Panama Papers as setting up tax haven companies in late 2014, just as Vladimir Putin’s Russia laid waste to the east of his country.

In 2013, Hintze, who runs CQS with the aid of offshore companies, struck a deal to pay the British taxman $43 million over the group’s use of “employee benefit trusts”.

Road to riches

Oz colleague Niki Savva’s warts-and-all — and it’s all warts — expose of the fall of the Abbott empire, Road to Ruin, has sold so well publisher Scribe is putting out a new edition of her first book, So Greek.

So Greek, Savva’s 2010 account of her time in the Canberra press gallery and at the service of then-treasurer Peter Costello “sold very well”, Scribe founder Henry Rosenbloom told Margin Call.

“But it didn’t sell anything like this one,” he said. He said sales of RtR had “slowed — it’s gone from remarkable to terrific” — to 2600 copies a week.

In five weeks on sale, more than 20,000 have been sold, prompting three reprints.

“There’s now just 2000 books left in the warehouse,” he said.

So Greek is due back in bookshops in September.

Missing in action

The unofficial election campaign continues to deliver woe for the man who knifed Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, this time in the must-win marginal Victorian electorate of Corangamite.

Local member Sarah Henderson, who wrestled the seat from Labor’s Darren Cheeseman in 2013, and sits strategically in camera shot behind PM T in parliament, was an apology at the Anzac Day service at the Anglesea sub branch of the RSL.

Despite the civilised 9.30am kick-off, the journalist-turned-pollie sent a proxy, senior adviser and sometime speechwriter Richard Troeth, to read PM T’s Anzac Day address.

Only problem was Troeth hadn’t arrived by the time it was his turn at the mic as the hundreds of potentially swinging voters gathered.

It was left to the MC to fill the ensuing awkward silence, while organisers turned to local primary school kiddies to belt out an emotive number.

Corangamite, which covers the sea-changer-laden Victorian surf coast, Geelong’s working-class western suburbs and stretches inland past squattocracy stronghold Colac, is shaping as a key battleground.

Labor is hopeful its candidate, former Surf Coast Shire mayor Libby Coker, can snatch the electorate, where jobs are under threat thanks to the impending end of Geelong’s car industry and the shuttering of its Target HQ, plus the closure last year of Alcoa’s coastal power station.

It comes on top of Anzac strife for Stuart Robert, who PM T reshuffled out of his gig as veterans’ affairs minister after a secret mission to China involving Liberal donor Paul Marks, and following an ugly spat in which Sophie Mirabella, who’s once again running for Indi, said the marginal electorate missed out on $10m in hospital cash because it snubbed her for Cathy McGowan last election.

Manning the subs

Mirabella’s expertise in handing out political largesse should come in handy this week.

She’s also on the board of the Australian Submarine Corporation, given the gig in December 2013 as consolation.

And in that role she’s to help oversee the $50 billion or so in spending on new subs, an announcement on which is due within days.

Never mind the defence of the nation, Adelaide boy Christopher Pyne’s future hangs in the balance.

Mirabella’s time is obviously at a premium, with the former pollie missing three ASC board meetings last year.

And will she have to resign the $73,000-a-year position because it’s an “office of profit under the Crown” when the campaign proper kicks off?

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