Village Roadshow a costly ride for Charles Goode

Illustration: Rod Clement

For all of Margin Call’s focus on the Cormack Foundation, it turns out Village Roadshow has been a more costly Melbourne-based horror show for Charles Goode.

In recent years the listed film and theme park business has torched millions of dollars of the fortune of former ANZ chairman Goode, best known to many as Victorian Liberal president ­Michael Kroger’s Cormack nemesis.

Through his conjugal private company Ravenscourt Proprietary Limited, Goode and wife Cornelia own 2.825 million shares in the Melbourne-based Village — or at least the couple did as of September 2017, when the company last released its 20 largest shareholders.

The Goodes owned that same pile of shares in early 2016, when shares in the Sea World, Movie World and Wet’n’Wild operator were trading at almost $7.50 a piece.

In the past two years the share price has collapsed to $2.18, sinking the Goodes’s stake to $6.15 million. Further pressure is expected when Village Roadshow resumes trading after yesterday’s $51m capital raising.

Village Roadshow investor Charles Goode. Picture: David Geraghty

Even for a banking blueblood, that’s a lot of money to have entangled with Village Roadshow’s proprietal joint executive chairman Graham Burke (who has been on the company’s board since it listed 30 years ago, in 1988) and Robert Kirby (son of Roc Kirby, who founded Village in 1954).

In a belated effort to deal with Village’s considerable debt pile, Burke and Kirby yesterday announced a $51m raising.

Shareholders are being offered five new shares for every 26 they own at an offer price of $1.65 — a discount of almost 25 per cent on the last close.

For the Goodes, that’s an offer of more than half a million shares — or almost $1m worth (assuming they haven’t changed their holding in the past 12 months).

Regrettably, Goode was “in a meeting” when Margin Call phoned yesterday so we were unable to learn whether the company’s biggest individual shareholder outside of its management and founding family will back Burke and Kirby and take up the offer.

We were also unable to find the Cormack Foundation or any related entity in Village’s top 20 shareholder list.

Some welcome good news for Victorian Liberal party members.

Thais that bind

We’ve learned a little bit more about billionaire Solomon Lew’s nemesis in his battle for a villa in the Thai beach hub of Phuket.

According to the account Lew has given in court documents in both the Virgin Islands and a related action in the Singaporean High Court, the Premier Investments chairman entered into a verbal agreement to buy the villa on October 11 last year.

Chatter is Lew agreed to part with a bit over $5m of his $2.55 billion fortune to buy the holiday home.

According to the court documents, the vendors were “Mr and Mrs Nargolwala”.

As we wrote yesterday, the male half is Kai Nargolwala, a Singapore-based board member of chairman Urs Rohner’s Credit Suisse. He previously was the boss of the Swiss giant’s Asia-Pacific operations.

His better half is Aparna Nargolwala, who we understand is herself a person of considerable means.

A remaining character in this Southeast Asian luxe property drama, “Mr Larpin”, remains opaque.

Lew’s lawyers describe Larpin as a director of the Hong Kong-incorporated Quo Vadis Investments Limited and, it would seem, the person who snared the villa instead of Lew.

For now, how he did it remains a mystery.

Keneally’s clear call

Former NSW premier Kristina Keneally hasn’t yet clocked up six months in the Senate, but she’s already established herself as one of Canberra’s most transparent politicians.

Her initial disclosure revealed an impressive breadth of assets and a predilection for exchange-traded funds, a natty way for her and Boston Consulting Group husband Ben Keneally to pre-empt any conflicts of interest with the senator’s parliamentary business.

Now, after four rounds of Kenneth Hayne’s royal commission, Keneally has trimmed her exposure to the local financial scene.

She’s no longer a client of Andrew Thorburn’s NAB.

“I have closed my accounts at National Australia Bank,” Keneally writes on her latest update.

That may just be the result of better interest rates being offered elsewhere.

More ominous is her update concerning David Murray’s maligned financial services outfit AMP.

“I have terminated my relationship with AMP,” Keneally writes.

Sounds pretty final.

Numbers up

With a swirl of Governor-General Peter Cosgrove’s fountain pen, it has become official: the Gibraltar-headquartered, NT-licensed online betting outfit Lottoland is on Death Row.

On Monday on Queen Lizzie’s behalf, Cosgrove gave the royal assent to the Australian federal parliament’s Interactive Gambling Amendment (Lottery Betting) Act 2018.

That law bans Lottoland’s Luke Brill-led Australian arm from taking bets on overseas lotteries. It will come into effect six months from Monday’s assent — unless, of course, Lottoland can overturn the legislation with its threatened High Court challenge.

As Margin Call has previously reported, Lottoland had briefed barrister Noel Huntley to plot the case. Or was that just bluster?

Finally …

Margin Call has some apologising to do to the Ormond College educated Master of the Universe Ben Gray and one of his fellow BGH founders, Simon Harle.

In May, we published a story — since removed from the internet — that included some discussion of tax matters.

Margin Call acknowledges that Gray and Harle have always complied with the tax laws and there is nothing untoward or unusual in BGH Capital’s investment structure.