"Geez Colin must be slow news day if you want to use an email idea of mine."
It was a Tuesday morning, May 24, and your columnist was conferring with Angus Aitken – Bell Potter's head of institutional trading – about an email he had sent out that morning concerning the recent appointment of Michelle Jablko as ANZ's chief financial officer.
"Former investment bankers tend to be crap at most things in the listed world," Aitken opined to his clients of the appointment. He cited some particularly big clangers she had on her CV.
Jablko's last major deal as an investment banker was advising Slater & Gordon on the acquisition of Quindell's main business in 2015 for $1.3 billion. It proved to be one of the most disastrous acquisitions in Australian corporate history.
The incendiary email led to his sacking – allegedly at the instigation of ANZ's senior brass who cried sexism – and triggered a subsequent lawsuit that has engulfed ANZ's chief executive, Shayne Elliott.
In any other year you would not have expected one email to trigger such a mess, but that's how 2016 rolled.
The world gave us Brexit, and Trump, but Australia got in early with the Dick Smith collapse and the topsy-turvy repercussions of the capricious beast that is the Chinese market.
It resurrected the fortunes of Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest, while sending our infant formula makers into meltdown. And it played a crucial role for James Packer who is revisiting the depths of both personal and professional turmoil yet again.
Annus horribilis
The freshness of Packer's woes should not obscure the scale of this professional disaster. Packer may have successfully cashed in his bet on Macau, but has lost his bigger bet on China.
This is the only way to interpret his retreat from Melco Crown – and the scuttling of his plans in Las Vegas.
His break up with Mariah Carey, and its reported $50 million bill, is looking like a bad date by comparison.
Crown's transgression in China has seriously tarnished the Crown brand with the clients bankrolling his global ambitions: Chinese high rollers.
This has serious implications for every casino he operates as Crown's recent market update showed. They have clearly twigged to the message from Beijing and have deserted his casinos in droves, which is why VIP revenue has plunged since the detention of the 18 Crown employees who will be spending Christmas in a Beijing jail.
Packer might want to stay in his Argentine bunker a little longer, so no one can hear him scream if the Chinese high rollers never come back.
As for the successful Melco Crown sale, you only have to go back to Packer's hubristic words from last year to know that selling out of Macau was not part of the plan.
"There aren't many Australians who have built a truly global business," he told The Weekend Australian in August last year. "I am going to give it my all to be one of the Australians who succeeds in that ambition."
At the opening of Melco Crown's Studio City in October Mariah Carey's assets distracted attention from Packer's proclamation of devotion to that other significant partnership in his life – Melco Crown partner Lawrence Ho.
"We're a role model joint venture of how an Australian company and Chinese company should work," he said.
Casino watchers in Asia are now questioning what exactly Packer brought to Melco Crown besides the original casino licence.
His shower of tinsel – which included The Audition, the short film starring Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt which cost as much as $US70 million – failed to make any lasting impact beyond the incredulity at its cost.
Following the massive about-face this month, Crown will return to its old role of being a local gambling operator with very small operation in the United Kingdom.
You can't get more Australian than that.
Blackmores happy pills
The good news for Packer is that his fortune has remained intact despite the turmoil and he stands to reap a bounty after Crown announced plans to send hundreds of millions of dollars back to its investors from the Melco Crown sell-down, and through dividends.
Marcus Blackmore also gets pretty good cash flow from his pill-popping outfit thanks to dividends, and a rather generous employee profit share scheme. But there is no hiding how much his paper wealth has been torched thanks to a little indigestion from the Chinese market.
Blackmore's market value has more than halved, wiping out more than $2 billion of investor wealth. This includes a $500 million cleanser for Marcus Blackmore himself.
The news is even worse for Bellamy's Organic which is facing lawsuits over its market disclosure after a disastrous downgrade this month. The company attempted to bury the news of how badly it misjudged the Chinese market and the strength of its so-called "luggage channel".
This a reference to one of its main sales channels during the peak of the baby formula craze. People were grabbing the ultra pricey and organic product straight off supermarket shelves and literally channelling it overseas in their luggage.
It was always going to end in tears when China turned the rapid ascent into a steep decline.
Buying organic can be expensive, but the higher costs are well worth it. Do you agree? https://t.co/cvsKb6ogtc pic.twitter.com/fthfm3c63n
— Bellamy's Organic (@BellamysOrganic) March 17, 2016
Luckily, the top execs at Bellamy's managed to cash in before the massive bout of indigestion hit the share price.
The group's chief executive, Laura McBain, and chairman, Rob Woolley, rebalanced their investment portfolios in August with a combined $5 million share sale – realising a 1450 per cent gain on the stock since its 2014 listing.
"Laura and Rob will be investing in personal assets and supporting private family investments," the company said at the time.
McBain clinched a sale price of $14.55 a share for her stake, and her chairman Woolley did better at $14.60 for nearly half his stake in the group.
It was not a good look this month when Bellamy's shares were trading about the $6 mark.
Then came the prolonged trading suspension, and then multiple class action lawsuits by investors.
When, or if, it ever re-emerges from its voluntary suspension from trading next year, the stock will certainly be trading much lower.
Laura and Rob's great escape still pales next to that of Fone Zone founder, Maxine Horne.
In September, Horne diversified her own portfolio with a $49.5 million shares sale in September at $4.95 a share.
In November, the stock plunged after news leaked of a potential relationship negotiation with business partner Telstra. Fone Zone's main business is running Telstra retail shops so this was a big deal.
She would have been $15 million worse off had she sold these shares when this news hit the share price in November.
The stock has chugged into Christmas at a modest $3 a pop.
Forrest's gumption
And the comebacks don't get any more epic than the revival of Andrew Forrest's fortunes. And this time, it looks like it is here to stay.
Sure, his iron ore is pretty low grade, but the price of the not-so-precious metal has been on a tear. And Fortescue has managed to re-engineer its operation to become a low-cost miner that can survive in any environment.
The high iron ore price has allowed Fortescue to pay down debt to a level that puts it on the verge of becoming a cash cow for Twiggy. He owns one-third of the company which hit a valuation of $21 billion this month.
This added more than $5 billion to the fortunes of Forrest in less than a year. And that does not include other perks of being the boss – like naming the new supertankers after his wife, Nicola and the rug rats.
The brand new #fmgnicola at Port Hedland port @FortescueNews pic.twitter.com/cay6YB0imq
— Tess Ingram (@TessIngram) December 19, 2016
And if you believe Forrest, this revival of his outrageous fortune is exactly how he planned it. We were all looking at the high-wire act and ignoring the safety net he had in place, so he says.
"I had this rock-solid faith in Fortescue since I started the company," Forrest told BusinessDay in October. "With every really brave plan A, we had had a bulletproof plan B, and people don't give us credit for that. People just see the high wire of the plan A. It's not a rabbit out of a hat."
Sure, his current net worth may look piss weak compared to 2008, when the value of Forrest's shares hit $13 billion.
But this time it is based on real money. In 2008, Fortescue had barely dug up its first ounce of the steel-making ore, and it had gorged on billions of dollars of debt debt to do so. And then the financial crisis hit.
Speaking of gorging, Forrest's triumph even managed to upstage the incredibly shrinking fellow Perth billionaire, Gina Rinehart. She shed about 40 per cent of her body weight according to midyear reports – which coincided with Clive Palmer having similar success with the scales.
The weight loss also coincided with her private company stacking on the debt to fund its newly operational Roy Hill mine.
The long-term debt tally came to $7.2 billion on Hancock Prospecting's accounts last year, generating an interest bill of $586 million. And keep in mind she has yet to pay the $386 million bill for the Kidman cattle station.
It would have been enough to drive CBD back to the buffet table, that's for sure.
Livingstone, I presumed
CBD got very excited when the Commonwealth Bank announced in March that Catherine Livingstone – fresh from her retirement as Telstra's highly regarded chairman – was coming aboard, with immediate effect.
The bank's chairman David Turner – who turned 71 last February – was by then its longest serving director, and well past his use-by date.
I mean, how on earth was the bank going to reach Turner's deluded goal of being "the ethical bank" while he remained chairman? Turner had been on the board – and then chairman – since the genesis of the wealth and insurance failures.
Sure enough, Turner announced in October that he will step down at year's end.
Turner may have wished he acted sooner after receiving a very public black eye with a first strike against the bank's remuneration report in November. At least he can rest easy that it was not his fault – not according to David Turner.
Turner told CBD's colleagues at the AFR that our poor banks have been caught in the same reactionary madness that has delivered us Brexit and Donald Trump.
"If you think back to why Donald Trump was elected or why people voted for Brexit, they could well say, 'Well, here's an establishment issue that we just don't like'," he told the Fin.
"And why don't we like it? Because there's some element of life that we feel is slightly unequal, that we're not totally happy about, and here's a part that, [banks are] a perfect target."
So, those anti-establishment fund managers who voted their billions of dollars worth of stock against the bank's remuneration report were merely reflecting their anger at the inequality meted out on their downtrodden tribe.
At least we can rest assured that the banks played no part in bringing this mess upon themselves – including the Labor Party's call for a royal commission.
Captain's knock
And to end off on a positive note, who else could we turn to besides a dual Irish-South African citizen named Michael Clarke who succeeded with his bonkers idea of running Grange maker, Treasury Wine Estate, along the same lines as his previous employer – Oxo cube maker, Premier Foods.
Clarkie has now taken home $10 million in remuneration during the past two years, in what is a very fair reflection of the massive turnaround he has engineered at the winemaker.
The share price was $3.50 when he started in March 2014. It peaked at $11.50 in October this year as the market recalibrated – yet again – the potential he has unleashed at TWE with his relentless drive for efficiency and focus on the brands that matter.
Merry Christmas Clarkie.
Got a tip? ckruger@fairfaxmedia.com.au