Young Oliver Curtis: the school book

Illustration: Peter Nicholson.

Before it all ended up in court, accused insider trader Oliver Curtis and convicted insider trader John Hartman were just two fresh-faced lads with bad haircuts getting an education at one of Sydney’s most prestigious Catholic schools.

The 2003 yearbook of Saint Ignatius College, Riverview — the alma mater of Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and former prime minister Tony Abbott — shows the former best friends as young men with bright prospects, Hartman an all-round sportsman and debater with “enviable leadership skills” and Curtis a student who “excelled in all aspects of co-curricular and curricular activities”.

Fast forward 13 years and the pair now sit three metres apart in the NSW Supreme Court. Hartman, who has done his time behind bars, has given evidence against his old school mate and investment banker Curtis is seeking to preserve his liberty.

Before Curtis met Roxy Jacenko and the pair became a family with pigeon pair kids, his school friends James Fitzgerald and Ed Tighe recalled in their school yearbook that their mate left the Riverview boarding house once “he realised he had the best car in the year to drive to school”.

“Oli has maintained a balanced lifestyle during his final two years at the college and will long be remembered as introducing the ‘mullet’ to Riverview,” they wrote.

Mosman bromance

For a brief moment yesterday, the happiness of John Hartman and Oliver Curtis’s relatively carefree years as recent Riverview alumni burst through the gloom of the St James Road Court.

As the court was reminded, theirs was once a Mosman bromance.

Hartman told defence barrister Murugan Thangaraj that one way Curtis allegedly paid Hartman for his ill-gotten gains from tip-offs was with a Ducati motorcycle.

“The salesman at Fraser’s Motorcycles thought it unusual for a man to be buying another man a motorcycle,” Hartman wryly observed.

“He thought that you were a couple?” asked Thangaraj.

“I don’t know what he thought!”

From PR to property

Still, for Roxy, who turns 36 next month, the show must go on.

From fashion spin and social media, Jacenko is moving on with her plans to develop a block of apartments in Sydney’s fashionable Paddo, just behind Oxford Street.

In 2014 one of her companies, RPHC Holdings, of which she is sole director and shareholder, paid $2.66m for a nondescript but well-located building on Elizabeth Street, for which she’s just had approval from Deborah Thomas’s Woollahra Council to push over.

Originally Roxy said she planned to build her firm’s new HQ there, but instead she’s since told council she’s going to spend $1.7m knocking up six new apartments on the site.

Can’t keep an entrepreneur down.

Coffee watch

Enroute to peruse the Riverview yearbook, “Our Alma Mater 2003”, we passed the media ensemble tangled in the crosshairs of Nick Di Girolamo, best known as the guy who gifted then NSW premier Barry O’Farrell a $3000 bottle of Penfolds Grange.

Di Girolamo is suing Fairfax Media for defamation.

Taking a break from court at Beanbah on Sydney’s Macquarie Street were The Sydney Morning Herald editor-in-chief Darren Goodsir, ex-Fairfax reporter Linton Besser, NSW state political editor Sean Nicholls and ferocious investigative reporter Kate McClymont.

The stakes are high for all, so apologies for the minor bomb scare with Margin Call’s abandoned briefcase.

Lunch at the Ivy

It was an all-star cast at Justin Hemmes’ Ivy Ballroom yesterday for this fine journal’s Competitive Advantage Forum lunch.

NSW Premier Mike Baird opened proceedings, while the crowd was impressed with ANZ chair David Gonski’s use of the word “transmogrify”.

Virgin director and AFL commissioner Sam Mostyn was handing out real estate tips, while Turnbull cabinet minister Josh Frydenberg made time during the hectic campaign for the talkfest.

Billionaire Gretel Packer sat on the head table along with Baird’s chief of staff Bay Warburton, who was still buzzing from his Israel trip, while Macbanker and Ormond College’s Robin Bishop was also in the house, as were NAB’s business banking boss Angela Mentis and Baird’s new recruit, Clive Mathieson.

Busy bee

From feather duster to rooster, it’s been one hell of a week for former competition tsar Allan Fels.

After being sacked last week by billionaire Russ Withers’ 7-Eleven, Fels mounted a one-man media blitzkrieg, using a contact book built up over decades to get his story out.

Newspapers, 7.30’s Leigh Sales and radio’s Ross Greenwood all got the message loud and clear: Fels had been given the boot, contrary to the spin that it was a mutual parting of the ways put out by Withers’ public relations consigliore, former Jeff Kennett headkicker Steve Murphy of FTI.

Yesterday, Employment Minister Michaelia “DNA” Cash handed the veteran regulator a new job, deputising him to a taskforce looking into migrant worker exploitation (eg, at 7-Eleven). Not a bad week’s work for a septuagenarian.

Life after Asciano

Regulators and lawyers might still be pawing over Asciano’s break-up, but already troops on the $9bn deal are contemplating their next incarnation.

Goldman Sachs’s Ashley Conn has decided his shelf life as a banker has expired, with Simon Rothery’s Melbourne-based executive director exiting on Friday. Until recently Conn had been part of a team that advised Asciano on its defence.

Conn, brandishing a Wharton MBA, is off to count the coin at local start-up Unlockd (who knows where the ‘e’ went), under co-founder and gun cricketer Matt Berriman.

It’s a tech business that’s attracted the attention of investors including Lachlan Murdoch, Bank of Melbourne chief Scott Tanner and Spotless chair Margaret Jackson.

Going global

The Melbourne Mining Club is taking the art of the diggers lunch global with a new international advisory board.

Club chair Richard “Tricky” Morrow — a Baillieu Holst partner and great supporter of the idea that a rotund stockbroker is a successful one — has revealed that Phil Beard will be taking up a London slot, while Robert W Kennedy (the W is to avoid confusion) gets a New York gig.

The honorary possies for the not-for-profit club, which regularly pulls 600 miners to Melbourne Town Hall for a feed with a big ticket mining boss — South32’s Graham Kerr is up next — reflects the success of the MMC’s international functions, especially the annual “MMC in London” dinner at Lord’s.

Former journo Beard is now one of the best known Aussie stockbrokers in the City of London, where he heads the institutional desk at Bell Potter, while Kennedy is a corporate relations specialist with Columbus Circle in the Big Apple, which follows his 30-year history in international financial markets.