By Stephen Brook and Kishor Napier-Raman
Historic Toorak mansion Cloyne, a place with an illustrious past and controversial near present, has sold for more than $5 million.
The five-bedroom, five-bathroom and four-car residence was built in 1926 and designed by renowned architect Harold Desbrowe Annear. It includes a luxurious outdoor pool flanked by colonnades, a porte cochere over the sweeping driveway and a ballroom accessible from the garden. Handy. The Toorak Road mansion also has a cellar, sunroom, sauna, studio and timber-panelled upstairs.
Toorak Road mansion Cloyne.
Cloyne was built for Louis Nelken, who as social legend has it, parlayed a position as a butler to the royal family into Melebrity status, marrying the daughter of an early Victorian chief justice. Their Melbourne Cup eve parties were frequently attended by the Baillieus, Horderns et al and kept “The Life of Melbourne” column in The Argus, a CBD forebear, busy over many a year.
Jellis Craig Stonnington director Nathan Waterson was coy on the exact sale price but told CBD the home sold to a local family ahead of the planned weekend auction for a price above the $4.75 million to $5.23 million guide price. A great result for a property that has been lying vacant and needs a massive renovation.
The Argus’ Life of Melbourne column.Credit: National Library of Australia
More recently, the property was the family home of controversial childcare centre boss Darren Misquitta, who bought it for his wife and two children in 2016 before transferring it to his wife, Karina, several years later.
Misquitta was in the news recently as a director of Genius Childcare, a nationwide childcare centre chain that operated six centres in Melbourne.
In March the chain was taken over by administrators who say Misquitta and the string of 37 companies he controls owe $38 million in debts – including a $94,000 Coles grocery bill. And the Tax Office says one company, formerly known as Genius Learning, owes it more than $10 million.
But the home was not sold by Misquitta. It had been repossessed by mortgagee Oak Capital, which is controversial for different reasons. The company told CBD: “Thank you for your enquiry. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on individual lending arrangements or enforcement matters.”
Regulator ASIC is suing Oak Capital in the Federal Court for unconscionable conduct over 47 different loans totalling $37 million. The company denies the allegations and says all its loans comply with relevant laws and industry standards.
The company hit the headlines when former A Current Affair journalist Seb Costello chased an Oak Capital executive into the women’s toilet in the Intercontinental Hotel on Collins Street, spraying him with questions about what some allege is the company’s ruthless loans policy.
Costello later resigned from Nine, owner of this masthead, for unrelated reasons. But builder Peter Aquino, who was present during the toilet chase after agreeing to take part in the ACA story, is taking separate court action against Oak Capital in the Supreme Court after it appointed a receiver to his company Construct Homes in 2024, ruining his business.
Aquino alleges Oak overcharged him on a business loan. He has now issued Oak Capital Wholesale Fund and Oak Capital Mortgage Fund with a Supreme Court default notice for failing to comply with an order to produce documents for a process of discovery.
On the conference circuit
CBD has been keeping a close eye of late on the legal profession’s slow but shocking re-embrace of disgraced former High Court judge Dyson Heydon, who was found by an independent court inquiry to have sexually harassed six female associates.
We revealed last month that Heydon will be one of the guest speakers at conservative legal group the Samuel Griffith Society’s upcoming national conference in Perth, part of a book tour of sorts for the ex-judge’s new self-published contract law tome that is proving a bit of a legal hit.
Now, the conference has added another legal figure to its line-up – none other than former attorney-general Christian Porter, who was the nation’s top law officer when the allegations against Heydon were made public in 2020.
Porter, who did not respond when CBD sought to contact him, subsequently ordered his department to undertake an internal investigation into Heydon’s time as the Abbott government’s hand-picked trade union royal commissioner, which revealed further complaints against the former judge.
By the time the report was released, Porter was subject of a historical rape allegation, which he has always strenuously denied. He later quit cabinet, and then politics altogether following his decision to use anonymous donors to fund an aborted defamation action against the ABC over the allegation.
Porter’s successor, Michaelia Cash, would later announce a historic six-figure settlement between the Commonwealth and three of the women harassed by Heydon.
Porter, once described as a future prime minister, has been working as a barrister in Western Australia, where he was recently defence counsel for one of two men found guilty of murdering Indigenous schoolboy Cassius Turvey.
He has also joined the board of the Western Australian Cricket Association – his first public role since quitting politics, and was spotted by CBD at former opposition leader Peter Dutton’s election-night wake in Brisbane last month, just to support a mate.
On the town after a big week
Spotted: Being a Liberal is thirsty work these days. So it was no surprise CBD’s spies spotted former Victorian deputy Liberal leader Alan Stockdale with ex-Howard government minister and fellow Victorian octogenarian Richard Alston, two of the three federal administrators tasked with bringing order to the party’s NSW division, departing the bar at Sydney’s Sofitel Wentworth last Thursday evening.
The venue has a special place in Liberal Party folklore as practically the party’s second home on election night over many years.
Last week Stockdale managed to drag the party through several days of avoidable humiliation after making an off joke at the expense of its perennially frustrated female members. If ever a week called for a veritable drowning of sorrows ...
Stockdale’s comments about how Liberal women were “sufficiently assertive”, made at a briefing for the Liberal women’s council no less, drew a storm of condemnation from grassroot Liberal women all the way up to new Opposition Leader Sussan Ley.