The List: Australia’s Richest 250, they dynasties ... Maloufs, Tarascios and Seymours
The scions of these wealthy families are taking their businesses forward and doing their parents proud.
It was the deal that would change Ian Malouf’s life. On the table was a proposal from waste management company Bingo Industries to purchase his Dial A Dump Industries for $578 million, including a cool $378 million in cash.
Three months earlier, in May 2018, his family had started an online luxury boat charter platform known as the Ahoy Club. His 22-year-old daughter, Ellie, was its Head of Charter, and in the heady early days of setting up the business she had plenty of questions for her entrepreneurial father, who had built Dial A Dump from scratch.
“There was something she was asking me around the same time I had to make a really big decision on the Bingo transaction,” Malouf now recalls of the deal that took his rags-to-riches story to the front page of the nation’s newspapers. “I said to her with affection, ‘Do you realise I have a really big deal going on at the moment and you are going to have to make that f..king decision on your own?’ And to her great credit, she did. That in a way unshackled her.”
THE LIST: Australia’s Richest 250
The response of Ellie that day and in the months that followed says plenty about the Malouf family, who came up with the idea for the Ahoy Club around a coffee table one evening in 2015.
“She is running with the Ahoy business very hard now, and I think it comes from when the Bingo transaction was going on,” Malouf says. “She is pretty inspiring for me.”
Today, the now 24-year-old and her father are sitting together on Sydney Harbour among the luxury white and navy interiors of Mischief, the $40 million, 54m superyacht Malouf bought in 2015 and comprehensively refitted. James Packer rented it last year for an estimated $414,000 per week. It is a surreal world, with Veuve Clicquot champagne on tap, staff at your beck and call, a party deck with a jacuzzi on the roof above us and six bedrooms below, including a stunning master suite that extends the full width of Mischief’s hull.
“You look around here and our life is potentially surreal,” Malouf says, sipping a cocktail. “But don’t forget my beginnings were a truck and a shovel. Because I have done that, we don’t take too much for granted.”
For a minute he acknowledges that keeping the feet of Ellie and her four siblings on the ground is the “only battle” for him and his wife Larissa, before he corrects himself. “It is not a battle actually; we are pretty lucky to have done that,” he says. “They have seen us work really hard. They have heard many conversations; they have heard me on the phone for hours sometimes and that sinks into your DNA growing up from a young age.
“With your kids coming through, you want the best for them. But they all get the same words on their 18th birthday: ‘Your money is your freedom.’ And if you translate that back, my money is not their freedom. If they want to do their own thing, have their own money and not be a trust fund kid, they are going to have to work for it.”
Ellie Malouf joined the customer service division of Dial-a-Dump while she was finishing her business degree at University of Technology Sydney (where she did an assignment on the superyacht industry). When she left university in 2017, she went straight into working on the launch of the Ahoy business. Her younger sister Lara followed suit.
Buying Mischief and paying big commissions to brokers to charter the yacht in the Mediterranean during the European summer of 2016 opened the Maloufs’ eyes to the opportunity to set up the first online platform for yacht charter bookings. Ahoy slashes the traditional commissions paid in the industry by more than 70 per cent, and offers more than 3600 yachts for charter, anywhere, for the best possible price.
“It used to take weeks or even months to secure a booking, but now we can secure it on the same day,’’ Ellie says.
In October last year, Ahoy paid $60 million to buy the 72m superyacht Coral Ocean at the Monaco Yacht Show. It is undergoing a multi-million dollar refurbishment overseen by Larissa Malouf, who is very close to her eldest daughter and all her children.
Ellie calls her father her greatest mentor.
“I am there day to day but having Dad’s support to build a global business is critical,” she says. “I bring forward a lot of things and ideas and Dad helps make them better. We fail fast, and you have to do that in a technology business. When you are wrong, you pivot.”
But trying to play disrupter in a decades-old, fast-money industry thousands of kilometres from your homeland has come at a price for the Maloufs. They were banned from the Monaco Yacht show in 2018, despite paying the €53000 entry fee. Then only 22 years of age, Ellie was on the one hand treated with contempt, but in nastier moments, threatened.
“Yeah, I was worried then,” Malouf says, referring to his daughter’s safety. “There is a behaviour overseas that is not acceptable. They can be outright rude.”
Ellie’s response showed the apple had not fallen far from the tree. “That intimidation can make someone shrink,” her father says proudly. “But with her, it actually made her better.”
His daughter acknowledges she is part of a “very young and female-dominated team” in a very old and male-dominated industry, “so there is resistance big time. Eighty per cent of the market is in Europe, and there in particular there is a lot of misbehaviour,” she says. “But it doesn’t worry me – it actually keeps me motivated.”
She will never forget the morning in August 2018 that her father signed the Bingo Industries deal, which also gave him a strategic stake in the listed company and a board seat.
“I was very proud and excited for him,” Ellie says. “It was a really great time for the family to celebrate his achievements over three decades.”
Ellie’s 22-year-old brother, Ed, now works at Bingo, while her younger twin brothers, Jack and Max, attend Geelong Grammar School’s Timbertop campus.
And despite the opulence of Ahoy and its world – it is now moving into the private jet market with the same disruptive model – she will never forget her roots.
“From a young age we were brought up watching Mum and Dad work hard,” she says. “It was inspiring. We were brought up as hard-working kids. Hearing dad’s story of building a business from scratch was very inspiring.
“When we started Ahoy I had big dreams to do the same and maybe I will outdo him!” she adds with a grin.
“Yes, we are so lucky, and we get to travel and have done that all our lives. But I am in this for my family. Seeing what Dad has done, I really want to grow the same for my own family.”
Ian Malouf would not have it any other way. “The numbers have never been important,” he says. “They are there on a page and they are a measure of your success, unfortunately. But I am not sure they have ever been my driver.
“They let me lead the life I live, that is why they are important to me. But not for any other reason. I am not trying to keep up with anyone. Deep down I am a garbo and it is the best grounding I could have had.”
-
BUILT TO LAST
During the speech he gave before beloved friends and family at a surprise party to celebrate his 70th birthday in 2014, Salvatore Tarascio mused that he couldn’t help feeling he was born under a Sicilian lucky star.
The billionaire, now better known in the property development industry as “Sam senior”, arrived in Port Melbourne from Italy in 1949 as a five-year-old “outcast migrant child” with parents who had left behind their life in Sicily. They lived with two other families in a 12sq m house in the Melbourne suburb of Werribee.
The parents instilled in their son a work ethic and values that came to the fore when in 1972 they founded Salta Properties, now one of Australia’s largest privately owned property developers.
Sam Tarascio and his wife of half a century, Christine, have passed on those ethics to their own children, the eldest of whom, Sam, became managing director of Salta aged just 30, in 2005. Six years ago, their youngest son, David, quietly established a venture capital and funds management arm of Salta. Their only daughter, Lisa, now runs her own business with her husband. Collectively the family is worth a cool $1.43 billion.
But bridging the generation gap hasn’t always been easy. “We have come across that little bit of difficulty where my aggression was maybe too great, or my expectation was too great. I don’t know; we are from different worlds,’’ says the now 75-year-old Sam senior, seated at a table with his two sons in Salta’s suave Melbourne headquarters in an office tower at the Paris end of Collins Street.
“Do I agree with everything they do? No, of course I don’t. Does that lead to debate? Yes. Does it occasionally lead to an argument? Yes,” he adds slowly, before his eldest son interjects with a single sentence, followed by a wry smile: “We have had some terrific conflicts!”
But his father continues, displaying a capacity for self-analysis rarely seen in family patriarchs, and one that has never been his forte.
“An entrepreneur who starts with nothing and creates a business sometimes struggles with the routine and the management system that is needed to run a business. I don’t think entre-preneurs are good managers of businesses,” Tarascio says bluntly. “They might be creative, but they are not good managers.”
He jokes that he once believed a fax machine was the best invention ever, and says for decades he never bothered to learn to use a computer because his personal assistants always knew how. “I could not get into the detail of running the business in the way Sam and David do it,” he says.
His decision to let go has seen a fundamental change in the structure and inner workings of the Salta empire and the Tarascio family, which they publicly reveal in this interview for the first time. Three years ago, the family agreed to bring in then PwC partner David Smorgon, himself a victim of the greatest family break-up in corporate history – the 1995 dismemberment of the $1.5 billion Smorgon Consolidated Industries empire.
“David would be one of the best people to have a view on this, having gone through a similar circumstance,” Tarascio says. “I know he is very supportive of the way we are going and what we are going to be doing in maintaining the business as an intergenerational business.”
In May 2018, Smorgon helped the Tarascios establish a formal business board, chaired by former Redflex CEO and Melbourne Water chairman Paul Clark. It replaced a loose and informal advisory board that had operated for many years. The two other external directors on the business board are former Aconex co-founder Leigh Jasper and Ted Yancken. The latter was for 20 years the group director of Melbourne builder Probuild Constructions, which most recently worked for billionaire John Gandel on the stunning glass-panelled roof at Chadstone Shopping Centre in Melbourne’s southeast. Also on the business board are Sam senior, Sam and David Tarascio.
Smorgon also helped the Tarascios establish a family board, which he chairs, a family charter, and a set of values for Salta that took two years to formulate. The values are encapsulated in threes sentences: “The Tarascio Family values respect, trust and time for each other. We hold in high regard a strong worth ethic and commitment to the community, leading to success in our individual and collective objectives. We support each other through good and bad times, learn from them and humbly celebrate our successes, within a harmonious and united family.”
Smorgon says Salta’s values are living proof that wealth is never the glue that keeps a family together. “Shared values and principles, a willingness to learn and grow, together with genuine care, love and support for all family members, builds trust and respect, which in turn develops a healthy, harmonious and happy family,” he says, before adding dryly: “It is not about the dollars.”
Tarascio concedes that was hard to let go and bring in external expertise at Salta. “It was fairly difficult, to the degree that you always have done what you wanted to do in the way and manner you wanted to do it,” he says. But he doesn’t regret it for a moment.
“The reality of life is that you are not here forever. If you don’t make the provisions, then everything becomes a mess in the end. We have all seen heaps of examples of families suing each other. When there was a level of uncertainty as to where I was going, I thought it was appropriate and necessary.”
He frankly acknowledges that giving his own children senior roles in his business carried an element of risk. “That risk is not a pure business risk, but it is a risk that would go through the whole family if things didn’t work out,” he says. “You have to be confident of the capabilities, and you have to accept there will be a level of conflict; it has to happen. As long as it is constructive, it is OK. It is the aspiration of most fathers that you have a family business, and to that degree it is fantastic.”
Tarascio still controls the discretionary trust that owns all the Salta entities, and he regularly pays a so-called lifestyle dividend to his children that is flexible and correlates with the performance of the business. But under the family’s succession plan, the Tarascio family board will become the successor appointee of all of the trusts on Sam senior’s passing – meaning the business becomes effectively owned by the family shareholders.
“The business needs to be ongoing for multiple generations,” his son Sam says. “We don’t want it broken apart by family members and dispersed. We want it to be a long-term, sustainable family business. We wanted there to be no disruption to the business no argument at the time that [his father’s passing] comes about, and that it be automatic – that there is total clarity.”
Sam’s sister Lisa, a former lawyer at Arnold Block Leibler, may have established her own successful conveyancing business with her husband Chris, but she still attends family board meetings and receives regular updates on the performance of the Salta businesses. In her father’s autobiography, published in 2018 and titled My Way, she noted that Tarascio wouldn’t allow her to work in the company warehouses during school holidays because of the foul language, and that he had always been very protective of his only daughter.
“I remember through the whole of my childhood sitting on my Dad’s lap wrapped in his arms and feeling that all with the world was right,” she said, before noting her father had always been “there to encourage and support Chris and me” through life’s challenges.
Tarascio’s wife of 47 years, Christine, is also on the family board. “She fits in as the glue that keeps the family together, and that is very important,” he says. In his book, he put it more eloquently: “There is no doubt in my mind that the family harmony we experience is a direct result of Christine’s influence and loving ways, which have had such an effect on all of us. Christine is a saint in every respect.” She has been the primary driver of the family’s recent decision to establish the Tarascio Family Foundation after many years of working actively with charities.
Somewhat surprisingly, Salta flirted with the public markets for a time. Two years ago, it engaged PwC and several investment banks to do the numbers for a potential float on the sharemarket. Tarascio says it got “very close”, but maintains Salta’s risk profile would never suit a public company. “I don’t think it will ever be off the radar as the business continues to grow,” he says, “but it is not something we are currently looking at.”
David Tarascio, who has just turned 40, has bold ambitions for the family’s venture capital arm, Salta Capital, which has an interest in companies across property development, technology, hotels and real estate, and a broad portfolio of shares. “It is a way of diversifying the business, born out of the fact that if you are in the same business and it is totally occupying your mind, it is hard to be open to other factors in the world that may impact the main business,” he says.
Salta Capital is raising $50 million for a new venture capital fund known as Baton Ventures. Meanwhile the core Salta Properties business is now managing an estimated $5 billion project pipeline spanning the construction, commercial, residential, hotel and build-to-rent sectors. Its flagship projects of the past two decades include the 150 Clarendon Street residential tower in East Melbourne and Richmond’s Victoria Gardens Shopping Centre.
Tarascio and his sons still lunch together most days. The patriarch’s title is now founding director, having changed last year from executive chairman. “We have been good in managing the transition, because in certain things Dad does recognise he is a fish out of water – some patriarchs don’t,” says Sams. “You have to recognise when the ways you have done things in the past are less relevant. It takes a pretty wise person to be able to recognise that themselves. We are lucky Dad has that skill and ability.”
He says one of his prime objectives every day is to ensure his father remains involved in the business in the areas that interest him most, notably early-stage project management.
His brother has a slightly different take: “The way I’d summarise Dad, he is very tough, he is very hard, but I actually think he is quite fair. Whether it is family or business, he tries to see things from all angles, which is something I have tried to do as well. The best deals are win-wins for all. He is very good at knowing what is motivating people in deals on both sides. It is easy sometimes just to see things from your own point of view in business, in family and deal structuring, and it takes constant effort to see it from both sides. He is always doing that.”
Tarascio senior took leave from the business for most of his 69th year to build a Hamptons-style house adjacent to the family’s 2500-strong olive grove plantation at Point Leo on the Mornington Peninsula. He wanted it finished for his 70th birthday and it was, but not before he experienced the only workplace accident of his life: falling from the roof of the half-built home, injuring his head, bruising his ribs and snapping the tendon in his arm.
He has always believed that his late grandfather, an olive oil processor in their Sicilian town of Vizzini, would be proud of his grandson’s latest hobby – producing Taralinga olive oil. “It is not about making money really, it is about producing the very best,” Tarascio says, noting the Taralinga brand won gold and silver medals at the 2019 New York International Olive Oil Competition.
Asked about the most important thing he has taught his children, he momentarily rocks back in his chair and then smiles proudly. “I have always maintained that a lot of kids grow up having an expectation that relates to the parents’ success. My kids have never had that. That is very, very important. While we now have a family charter and they now know where they are going, given all the work we have done, had we not done that, there was no expectation or feeling of entitlement. They would be just as happy being independent ... The way I related to them through their formative years has contributed to that. That is something not many families are capable of instilling in their kids.”
-
SHARED DRIVE
Kevin Seymour says he learnt his most important lesson in business from his late father, Bill, as they built the Kings Parking group into Brisbane’s biggest provider of parking services.
“My father taught me that cashflow is king. The better your cashflow, the better you will be. And that is something I have tried to instill in her,” the 79-year-old says. He’s sitting alongside his daughter, Leigh, in her apartment at the family’s luxurious One Macquarie development at Teneriffe, one of Brisbane’s most exclusive addresses.
While Seymour used the profits of Kings Parking to seed the early commercial and residential developments that built the foundations of his Seymour Group (now one of the nation’s biggest private property groups), his daughter has returned to the family’s roots. Over the past decade, Leigh Seymour has built a significant portfolio of carparking investments that today includes the McWhirters Carpark in the rapidly growing inner- city suburb of Fortitude Valley and the St Andrews carpark in Spring Hill.
Over that time she has also owned the carparks at Brisbane’s Festival Hall and Melbourne’s Victoria University. And she has a stake in the listed company Ariadne Australia – of which her father is deputy chairman – which until three years ago owned carparks in a joint venture with the nation’s largest carparking business, Secure Parking.
Leigh cut her teeth in the industry working during school holidays collecting entrance fees at her father’s various Surfers Paradise carparks.
“I didn’t think this what I was going to do when I was growing up,” she says. “I had a marriage breakdown and I had three kids to bring up on my own. I had to support myself and didn’t want to be totally reliant on Dad. I’m pretty independent and I wanted to forge my own way.”
Her father puts it more strongly. “She is pretty fiercely independent,” he declares, noting that while he gave Leigh some early financial assistance and advice, her investment portfolio is now worth “several hundred million dollars”.
“It just fed off itself,” he says. “It kept growing. Now she is very self-sufficient and she is trying to rival the empire I built back in my day.
“I have told her it is better to maintain your assets in bricks and mortar so at some later date you can sell them. But the investments have such good cash flows now that they provide a very good income stream for the future.”
The Seymour family philosophy on carparks has always been simple: they are better investments than office buildings because there are few staff and no haggling over rent with tenants, and the leases are usually long term. Yet Kevin Seymour says he never had any expectation that his daughter would follow in his footsteps.
“You are always proud of your daughter, it doesn’t matter what she does,” he says. “But the fact she has been able to make her way in a fairly competitive man’s world in property is great. You don’t see too many ladies at the top of the property ladder. I always joke that she is the carparking queen of Brisbane!”
His daughter eschews the title, but she does agree that the property industry in Brisbane still has a masculine edge.
“I find it is harder being a woman sometimes to get your point across or be taken seriously,” she says. “But I am finding my way.”
While her carparking interests are totally separate from Seymour Group, Leigh has recently started investing with her father in other property assets. In June last year, car dealer AP Eagers sold its auto dealership property in north Brisbane for $61 million to a joint venture between Leigh and Seymour Group.
The property, at 99 Breakfast Creek Road in Newstead, is one of the largest individual development sites in Brisbane and continues to operate its car business under a seven-year lease-back agreement.
“Long-term investment plays are important and that is what the Eagers site is,” says Kevin Seymour. It all gets back to cashflow. You will never go wrong in good times and bad if you have cashflow behind you.”
Leigh’s move is in line with another of her father’s mantras: diversification. Kevin Seymour now splits his assets between property investments, property development, the sharemarket, and investments and interests in the oil and gas sector. “He has taught me that I should always diversify and always have money in cash,” Leigh says. “Don’t put it all in one thing.”
The latest source of pride for the Seymours is the next generation of the family. Kevin’s eldest grandchild, Daniel Farquhar, has been part of the Seymour Group for the past decade. Now his three other grandchildren, Leigh’s children Kate, Trent and Ben, are doing their first property development – a 39-apartment boutique project in inner-city New Farm. They have already sold 56 per cent of the $110 million development at record prices for Brisbane.
“It is good to see the way they are progressing it, their attitude to financing it and how they are going to make it work from a feasibility point of view,” their grandfather says.
Their mother is impressed that her children have inherited her penchant for independence. “I am really really proud of them,” she says. “And if I ever try to get involved, they politely ask me to step back. So I am really chuffed.”
More Coverage
