CBD’s spies wandered into the VRC committee room on Saturday to find it suspiciously empty. We were told all committee members – bar vice chairman Michael Ramsden – had flown to the racing mecca of Royal Ascot for its big carnival.
While the VRC stumped up for flights for chairman Neil Wilson and chief executive Kylie Rogers, who were “invited by Royal Ascot and attended on official duties”, an insider told CBD that the other directors had paid their own way. The VRC and Royal Ascot have reciprocal membership rights.
King Charles and Queen Camilla at Royal Ascot last week. Credit: AP
The case can be made for promoting Melbourne Cup Week among the English racing elite and even luring some of their top-quality horses Down Under for the coming spring, but there is also a question of optics for an organisation with $70 million in debt and four years of losses.
The club, which doesn’t expect to return to profit until next year, spent $130 million on a new stand at Flemington before COVID and then shed 90 per cent of its revenue during the pandemic. (The stand looks like a cruise ship, for what it’s worth).
Glamorous international trips aside, board members will have to refine their drinking tastes. Penfolds has ended its four-year partnership with the racing club and Grange is off the menu. The VRC has signed De Bortoli Wines in its place.
The Victoria Racing Club board was in good company at Royal Ascot 2025. It was opened by King Charles and Queen Camilla and was also graced by Gillon McLachlan, the king of Melbourne while leading the AFL, and now head of gambling business Tabcorp. The AFL’s executive manager for government and stakeholder relations, Jude Donnelly, was also there for the first day of one of the world’s most prestigious racing carnivals.
Wearing a top hat, McLachlan told UK media that Royal Ascot was the pinnacle. “There’s a lot of Australians in town. I seem to have met hundreds of them,” he said.
While on McLachlan, the former AFL top dog has lost his top billing. He was relegated to the graveyard 4pm shift at the recent Macquarie Australia conference, leaving him to compete for attention with colourful logistics software business WiseTech.
Former health minister and vape lobbyist avoids bankruptcy
Former Howard government health minister and medical doctor Michael Wooldridge has enjoyed a more eventful post-political career than most.
That was, until last Friday, when the legal battle he’s been embroiled in with the corporate watchdog for over a decade ended quietly in an empty courtroom, as Wooldridge avoided bankruptcy by the skin of his teeth.
Former federal health minister Michael Wooldridge in 2013.Credit: Luis Ascui
Wooldridge’s legal troubles date back to his tenure as a director of retirement village company Prime Retirement and Aged Care Property Trust, which collapsed in 2010, taking with it $550 million. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission went after Wooldridge and two fellow directors for breaching their duties, succeeding in a 2014 Federal Court decision that was overturned on appeal.
In 2018, ASIC successfully appealed to the High Court, which, in a landmark judgment, held that Wooldridge and friends had breached their directors’ duties by approving payment of $33 million out of the trust’s funds to its founder, controversial Porsche-driving businessman Bill Lewski.
The former minister was eventually whacked with a $20,000 fine and banned from being a company director for two years. Wooldridge has since served out his time in the sin bin, been doing a bit of lobbying work for the vaping industry, and at one point employing former Labor senator Sam Dastyari, a bloke who knows a thing or two about flying too close to the sun.
But Wooldridge’s tangle with ASIC resumed this year when the regulator sought to bankrupt him over its legal costs, thought to be more than $2 million.
All those appeals stack up, and it seems ASIC has been waiting to get its costs back since the case was resolved in 2019.
Things were set for a showdown in the Federal Court last week. Instead, it all ended with a whimper as neither Wooldridge nor ASIC showed up. The parties’ lawyers quietly reached a deal behind the scenes, allowing the good doctor to avoid bankruptcy.
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