Inside KordaMentha’s secret billionaires factory – and it might be on the block
It’s no accident that you won’t find Mark Korda or Mark Mentha on any rich list, as the duo use their financial acumen unpicking failing businesses to turn themselves into secret billionaires.
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It’s by design, not by accident, that you won’t find them on any rich list: the two Marks – Korda and Mentha – have used their financial acumen unpicking failing businesses to turn themselves into secret billionaires.
Now, they might be looking to mint their reputations in a sale.
KordaMentha is best known as Australia’s premier corporate undertaker. It was set up more than two decades ago by sole-owners Mark Korda and Mark Mentha, whose prior firm Arthur Andersen imploded in the wake of the Enron scandal and, closer to home, its work for failed insurer HIH.
Their first gig was Ansett, which fast became Arthur Andersen’s second-biggest global client and is believed to have earned the two Marks $50m. Trying to salvage the nation’s No.2 airline blasted two little-known accountants into the corporate stratosphere.
Perhaps more importantly, it was formative for their relationships.
Mentha and fellow Xavier College graduate turned Labor leader Bill Shorten, who was working to protect Ansett workers’ jobs at the time, are close.
Mentha is also known to be friendly with trucking billionaire Lindsay Fox, who was trying to buy Ansett with mate Solomon Lew.
Both Marks are close to lawyer Leon Zwier, Melbourne’s “Mr Fix It”, who is considered best in class for corporate restructures. It was Zwier who got them the Ansett gig in the first place through his role as union adviser to Greg Combet.
Korda was briefly the president of AFL club Collingwood and is (or certainly was) on close terms with former PwC Australia CEO and former Carlton AFL club president Luke Sayers.
To complete the Melbourne sweep, he is an associate of Toll billionaire and former Essendon club president Paul Little, too.
All these relationships, backed it must be said by financial nous, have earned Korda and Mentha enormous personal wealth.
And in what’s being talked about as a final growth push before putting KordaMentha on the block, the business is now on a hiring binge from the big four consulting firms aiming to reshape the consulting market and snare some of the rivers of government consulting cash that used to land at PwC and KPMG.
Talk of KordaMentha being sold has bubbled among its partners for years, and one who spoke to The Australian on the condition of anonymity says the Marks have previously denied it.
“They’ve looked all of us partners in the eye and said ‘it’s not for sale’,” the partner says.
But that stance is believed to have softened since Mentha, who is in his late 60s, has struggled with health issues, including most recently prostate cancer.
His wife, Lisa, is understood to be wanting to close out what’s been an extraordinary business success for quality time.
“Lisa wants to sell,” another former partner agreed.
Says a third, who is good friends to the principals: “Mark being sick was the turning point for her … She loves spending time with him and enjoys their time away from Melbourne.”
Certainly, KordaMentha has given the Marks the good life.
Including their time at Arthur Andersen, the pair have worked together for 46 years. Korda is a member of the Australian Club, Mentha favours Aspen for ski trips, and both have a splattering of real estate.
However, perhaps unusually, it’s the Victorian township of Bonnie Doon made famous in The Castle that waterskiing fanatic Korda prefers. His holiday property is even on the same street as the fictitious Kerrigan home.
Former partners with some knowledge of the books estimate Korda and Mentha each take home about $20m in annual distributions. “The company turns over about $150m in revenue consistently,” says one.
“They’re making a gross margin of about 60-70 per cent.
“Some of the numbers were in a black box but we got a revenue number and the margin number sent to us every week.”
Korda laughs out loud. “Why would I work if that was the case? It’s a ridiculous figure. No professional services firms earn 60-70 per cent gross margins,” he tells The Australian. Mentha was unavailable to be interviewed.
A top consultant from a big four firm, who would also not be named, estimated 55 per cent was more realistic. Still, that level of dividend implies $400m apiece in the 20 years since they branched out alone.
The Australian is not suggesting the Marks or their associated companies, partnerships and trusts have breached any disclosure requirements. Simply, that they got rich without drawing the usual attention.
KordaMentha is a trustee company owned by the Marks and does not have to lodge accounts.
But their corporate interests both inside and outside of KordaMentha are vast.
Within KordaMentha is KM Real Estate, which has $750m of funds under management and works on joint venture developments and syndicated property. It also owns boutique advisory firm 333 Capital.
Then there’s their private investments. Throwing off significant cash before being sold at a hefty profit was Greyhound buses, which had been losing money. Their 333 Capital purchased the debt at cents in the dollar and pivoted the business into transportation for mining.
Korda says Greyhound was unusual because KordaMentha has a policy banning investments in client companies.
“We want to be fiercely independent and we don’t want to compete with our clients,” he says.
Greyhound was “a request from the client, because the equity holders and bankers decided receivership would have destroyed the business”.
Another is RedZed, a lender to self-employed professionals, which has a large warehouse facility with Westpac. The two Marks have held a minority shareholding, separately from KordaMentha, since inception.
Singapore-based international student recruiter Adventus was recently traded for a profit. And they are long backers of BuyMyPlace.
Korda confirms that in addition to the funds management businesses, he and Mentha have 10 investment vehicles in Australia. All are either in trusts or turn over less than $100m, and therefore are not required to file accounts. They have operations in Singapore, Jakarta and New Zealand, too.
Their KM real estate business invests alongside Little. Co-developed properties include Signature Apartments on the Gold Coast that was built in 2022 and currently has a 91sq m property for sale for $1.2m.
Soul Patts chief executive Todd Barlow, whose firm has used 333 Capital several times to advise on deals, says diversification protects their core business (insolvency) from stronger economic conditions when fewer companies collapse. “They worked out that their business is cyclical and 333 provides a countercyclical income,” says Barlow, whose own firm has never co-invested with 333, but describes their advice as “very good”.
He gleaned this lending Electro Optic Systems $70m when the defence and space systems company was otherwise staring down the barrel at administration.
“We wouldn’t use them otherwise,” Barlow says.
Not that all of the Marks’ deals have been winners. Stationary firm kikki.K, which it advised and invested in – as did Solomon Lew’s son Peter – has gone into administration, twice.
While it’s hard to know for sure, their biggest earner of all time is probably the Whyalla steelworks.
One of the former partners says KordaMentha probably made gross profit of $70m off Whyalla last time it collapsed under Arrium and was eventually purchased by Sanjeev Gupta.
Now Whyalla has failed again, and guess who’s back? KordaMentha is charging key partners out at $950 an hour, Insolvency News Online has claimed.
Mentha is known as the “Labor whisperer” and the administrator of choice for the union movement. Meanwhile Korda’s politics lean more to centre-right and he is believed to be close to former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who brought him in on the NBN.
“We have a lot of interactions with a lot of politicians … when a business-to-consumer collapses, such as Ansett, or they have significant employee issues,” Korda says neutrally.
Now, the two Marks see an opportunity to capitalise on the shake-out in the consulting industry, eating the lunch of PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and EY.
Their dominance has been challenged since PwC’s misconduct shone a light on shoddy confidentiality protection, unfettered access to government information and the billions of taxpayer dollars flowing to consultants with cosy relationships with Canberra.
“With all the disruption the government wants fiercely independent alternatives,” Korda says.
“We are hands-on and call it the way it is.”
Poaching from big four
In 2023, the firm hired Peter Konidaris, a PwC heavyweight and one of nine people who exited that firm following the tax leaks scandal.
The hire was arguably a brave one, optically. One of the former KordaMentha partners recalls: “When he lost his job no one would employ him, but Mark put the olive branch out. It’s a pretty aggressive growth strategy. He’s targeting something like a 30 per cent increase in the next two years. It’s massive growth.”
Except to the Marks, it made perfect sense.
“We have known Peter for 20-odd years. We used him in indirect taxes and he did great work and we trusted him. We believe he is an outstanding professional who was caught up in the PwC politics and we hired him,” Korda says.
Indeed, a parliamentary committee chaired by Deborah O’Neill found the nine people pushed out by PwC may have been selected as “sacrificial offerings” to address public outrage.
“There is every chance that some of those nine people identified were not the actual ones involved in the (former PwC partner Peter) Collins matter,” the committee wrote in its 2024 report.
Last year, KordaMentha set up its first ever Canberra office, led by two other former PwC partners, Andrew Mrnjavac and Jess Finlay. Also there is Mayuri Kain, who spent more than five years with PwC’s management consulting division. Cameron Blagdon joined via a quick bounce at Scyne.
That’s in addition to poaching PwC’s senior property team, led by Tony Massaro, and its first major projects team, led by PwC recruits David Ballantyne and James Wijemanne.
KordaMentha also snared the KPMG defence team. KPMG had been the major winner of defence contracts, with more than $400m written between 2022 and 2024, according to AusTender data. Then it grabbed the KPMG national security partners as well.
Korda describes this as “diversification”. He says: “In the last three years there’s been significant disruption in the professional services space and we have set a strategy of hiring outstanding people. You hire outstanding people and the business will come.”
While the two Marks already had top-notch political contacts, under their former business-as-usual model there was no need for a Canberra base because it’s just not the kind of place where businesses go broke.
Restructuring is only 35 per cent of KordaMentha revenue, says Korda, from more than half just 18 months ago.
“The big four are predominantly audit, tax and consulting firms,” he says. “We don’t do audit and we don’t do tax. We want to grow but we will be cautious about it. We hire people and get on with our business. We don’t have growth for growth’s sake.”
One constant, other than insolvency, is the Marks’ reliance on their psychologist turned performance coach, Yvonne Willich.
In-house psychiatrist
Yes, exactly like in Billions, the two Marks lean on Willich. “No one is hired without first talking to Yvonne,” says one of the former partners. The psychologist even scored an invite to Korda’s first-class 60th birthday bash in India.
Willich is believed to have been hired by the Marks when Korda was concerned about how Mentha was dealing with the end of his first marriage.
And just like Wendy Rhoades in Billions, Willich sits just outside the offices of the two Marks.
A trained psychologist in the house hasn’t stopped KordaMentha’s work environment from being described as toxic.
Records show former marketing executive director Renee Taylor made an application to deal with alleged contraventions involving dismissal to the Fair Work Commission Victoria last year, but KordaMentha successfully applied for the details to be deemed confidential. That complaint was later withdrawn.
WorkSafe Victoria is also understood to have made a surprise visit to head office in Melbourne last year. “It’s an arrogant boys club,” one person says.
So, will they sell?
“Mark’s (Korda) got the firm flowing in his veins,” said the very close friend of the pair.
As for talk about the Mentha side, while an exit is possible, Mentha is – once more – living and breathing Whyalla. Having spent several years in the port city 400km northwest of Adelaide, he is back in the steel game with the usual intensity.
“Every single day of every week he’s commuting to and from Whyalla,” the friend says. “People remember him … the panel beater, the petrol shop, the drive through Bottle & Bird where you get your chicken and beer. It’s surreal, everywhere you go down there, they remember the administrator.”
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Originally published as Inside KordaMentha’s secret billionaires factory – and it might be on the block
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