By Cara Waters
Lord Mayor Nick Reece won’t say who funded the surprise Robbie Williams concert in Federation Square, at which the British pop superstar was awarded the key to the city.
The City of Melbourne confirmed it spent $30,000 to help stage the gig, but Reece declined to detail who had funded the concert.
Robbie Williams shows his appreciation to the crowd at the free surprise concert in Federation Square, where he received the key to Melbourne.Credit: Paul Jeffers
“That’s a good question,” Reece said when asked on ABC radio who had paid for the event on January 2, which helped promote Williams’ film biopic Better Man.
“I’ll need to check on that. Robbie obviously gave his time for free. We did it, the City of Melbourne did it, in partnership with Fed Square.”
The free concert was attended by an estimated 10,000 people, and was also presented by Federation Square, Gold 104.3 and Roadshow Films.
Roadshow Films is a fully owned subsidiary of Village Roadshow, which, The Age revealed on Tuesday, requested Williams be given the key to the city and was the distributor for his Better Man biopic.
Village Roadshow did not respond to a request for comment on how much funding it had contributed to the concert.
A spokeswoman for MapCo, which operates Federation Square, said its contribution to the event was limited to in-kind support such as staging, staffing and production.
“This magical Melbourne moment made this our best summer of events yet,” Reece said.
“The event brought thousands of people together, generated $1 million in economic benefit and placed a global spotlight on our great city.”
Reece dismissed as “a load of nonsense” reporting of a potential conflict of interest in the awarding of the honour to Williams because John Kirby, one of the owners of Village Roadshow, had donated $10,000 in August last year to his campaign to be elected lord mayor.
“The person in question [Kirby] did not have a connection to the company in question, and so there was no need to make a disclosure,” he said. “There’s not been a connection for many, many years.
“No election donations received have any bearing whatsoever on our decision to award the keys of the city to Robbie. To say otherwise is utter nonsense.”
Kirby was formerly the chairman of Village Roadshow and company searches show he continues to be a shareholder in VRG HoldCo, the ultimate holding company for Village Roadshow.
Kirby is not the only Reece donor connected to Village Roadshow. Robin Bishop and Ben Gray, co-founders of private equity firm BGH Capital, donated $20,000 and $10,000 respectively to Reece’s campaign on September 10 and September 19.
The majority of Village Roadshow was bought by BGH Capital in 2020. It owns about 75 per cent of VRG HoldCo, Robert Kirby owns about 10 per cent, Graham Burke about10 per cent and John Kirby about 5 per cent.
BGH co-founder Ben Gray and his wife, Labor MP Luba Grigorovitch, at Flemington Racecourse last year.Credit: Elke Meitzel
“It’s a pure coincidence,” Gray said. “I certainly never suggested to Nick Reece, or anyone for that matter, to award Robbie Williams the key to the city, and I was unaware about Roadshow’s interactions with the City of Melbourne until today.”
Reece said concerns raised by councillors about the process for awarding a key to the city involved “some grumpiness that they weren’t given more notice”, and had “nothing to do with the donations”.
He said a lot of the organising to give Williams the key to the city was done during the caretaker period of council between September 17 and October 26 last year.
“There was a lot of people on leave at the time, including myself, and so that notification process could have been done better,” he said.
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