Australia’s Richest 250 #3: Harry Triguboff
Some families manage a bloodless transition — but it’s not easy.
Harry Triguboff is candid about his body, now 86 years old, not being what it once was.
“It’s an old machine; you can paint it, but you can’t change it,” says the man who over the past six decades has developed and sold more apartments than anyone in the country, making him the third-wealthiest person on The List of the richest 250 with a fortune calculated at $12.3 billion.
FULL LIST: Australia’s Richest 250
The ebullient owner and managing director of Meriton is speaking to The Australian in his office overlooking an unassuming stretch of Sydney’s Kent Street, not far from Town Hall.
On his desk is a Chinese network toy train. Behind it – on the wall adjacent to the photos of Triguboff with US presidents and Australian prime ministers – are three stuffed fluffy pink pigs, a recent gift to mark the animal’s pre-eminence this lunar year.
And on his right hand, beginning just below his wrist and disappearing under the sleeve of an immaculately tailored navy suit and up his arm, is a deep purple bruise. It’s from a fall he had five days before we meet.
“I was very lucky,” Triguboff says, assuring us that nothing broke. “My bones are very tough.”
For now, Triguboff and his sturdy bones are unquestionably in control of the Meriton apartment empire he started in 1963 and which now dots the Sydney, Brisbane and Gold Coast skylines.
Triguboff says he wants to keep working hard because he owes it to loyal Meriton staff to see the company through a tough period.
But the passage of time has focused his attention on perhaps the greatest business challenge for the patriarchs and matriarchs on The List: planning for the empires they have created to go on without them.
Building a multi-billion dollar fortune is a lot easier than dividing one harmoniously. “It is sad to see where so much effort and hard work has been built up into a family business and then it implodes,” David Smorgon, an expert on wealthy succession, tells The Australian.
Gina Rinehart’s seemingly never-ending dispute with her children Bianca and John – now off to the High Court after failed mediation efforts by a cast that has included Barnaby Joyce – is Australia’s best-known contemporary billionaire family feud.
The iron and cattle magnate is far from alone.
Making fewer headlines, but still with plenty of poison, is the dysfunctional division of the 81-year-old Lindsay Fox’s trucking, property and airport fortune.
“I’ve never seen anything like the Fox family brawl,” one adviser with decades of rich family succession expertise tells The Australian.
Despite a negotiating team that includes the famed union leader Bill Kelty, Luke Sayers’ professional services shop PwC and lawyers from Arnold Bloch Leibler, it remains both unresolved and, so goes the Melbourne gossip, increasingly bitter.
Smorgon identifies a generational problem behind much bungled succession planning.
“There are two things baby boomers don’t do: we don’t like having difficult discussions about succession, and we don’t like dealing with conflict or potential conflict in families,” he says. “We put them in the too-hard basket.”
Smorgon has experience with the division of a family fortune. Smorgon Consolidated Industries, the business empire founded by his grandfather Moses Smorgon, was broken up in 1995 and sold off and the family wealth is now split at least seven ways.
Smorgon now operates his own Melbourne-based family advisory, Pointmade, helping other wealthy families negotiate generational transitions.
‘A lack of planning is the most common problem. Delicate matters aren’t properly discussed, things aren’t put clearly in writing, and plans aren’t agreed to by the inheritors.’
A lack of planning is the most common problem. Delicate matters aren’t properly discussed, things aren’t put clearly in writing, and plans aren’t agreed to by the inheritors.
It can be an awkward exercise.
“Sometimes we are not sure that our kids have the ability or the interest to take over and that leads to putting it off, because it’s bloody difficult for parents to have those tough discussions,” says Smorgon. So who has done it well?
Smorgon is impressed by the example of Frank Lowy and his sons David, Peter and Steven, each of whom had leadership responsibilities across either Westfield, before the family sold it last year, or Lowy Family Group.
“The sons are obviously all very different individuals, but they have all been able to go and create their own shadow rather than just live in their dad’s,” says Smorgon.
The Besen family have done something similar. Patriarch Marc Besen has art and wine interests adding to the property fortune overseen by son Daniel, while daughter Naomi Milgrom owns the Sussan retail chain.
And a textbook example is the division of the fortune built by the late cardboard mogul Richard Pratt. That systematic and carefully laid succession plan is featured on pages 90-91 of Oxford Press’s Introduction to Management. Son Anthony Pratt, Australia’s richest person, owns Pratt Industries in the US and is in charge of Visy in Australia, owning that with his sisters Heloise Pratt and Fiona Geminder.
Sons-in-law Alex Waislitz and Ruffy Geminder have Thorney Investments and Pact Group respectively.
“Unfortunately, with what I have seen over the past few years there are many more on the other side of the table who are doing it very poorly,” says Smorgon.
Harry Triguboff is also candid about the fact that he has a bit of work to do with succession planning. “I haven’t finished mine yet,” he says. “I’m halfway through.”
While now in his ninth decade, he’s still in the office by 10am every weekday. That’s after reading the newspapers, doing an hour’s exercise and taking “all my bloody medicines” at his mansion in Vaucluse.
He leaves the office at six o’clock and, after taking an hour’s nap, might do another hour’s work before relaxing with his nightly game of billiards. On the weekend, he’ll do another 10 hours of Meriton reading and paperwork.
At a family meeting back in 2015, Triguboff’s daughters told him that they wanted to keep the business in the family. That ended talk of selling Meriton to Chinese investors for $12 billion or thereabouts. The new project was grooming his 20-something grandsons, Daniel and Ariel Hendler, to eventually take over.
By Triguboff’s reckoning, the aftermath of the latest apartment boom provides an excellent training opportunity.
“If it’s good times, you don’t learn anything,” he says, adding that the market is too complicated for him to hand the business over now.
Plus, he loves work and doesn’t like the look of the lives of his retired friends: “They’re miserable,” he says.
When the grandsons are ready, after some more years at the Triguboff apartment academy, he would love Meriton to continue under family management.
“I pray that the grandchildren are able to carry on the business,” he says.
But not yet. They still have a lot to learn.
“Daniel and Ariel will be in the business, but you can’t expect them to run it [yet]. And if they expect to run it I’ll sack them on the same day. Before I die! Don’t worry about it,” he says, laughing at the thought.
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