The art in Platinum's timing

IT'S entirely possible Kerr Neilson is familiar with the Chinese proverb "Those below follow the example of those above."

After all, when Neilson sold a big chunk of his Platinum Asset Management with precision timing before the global financial crisis, punters keen to emulate one of the most successful hedge fund managers of recent years rushed for a piece of the dream.

Pleasingly for Neilson, the float turned him and his wife Judith separately into overnight billionaires.

But it's also possible Neilson knows the Chinese proverb "Today we have the wine, so might as well get drunk today."

And over at Platinum the sauce appears to have run out for now, with a rather unpleasant profit warning yesterday spoiling the party for shareholders. Something about funds under management being down by, oh, just a billion bucks or so.

It's all rather unfortunate timing and not only for battle-scarred shareholders who might prefer to be in one of Kerr's funds.

Particularly given there's so much coming up for the Neilsons to celebrate.

Turns out Neilson and Judith are getting ready to celebrate the opening of their Chinese art gallery, White Rabbit.

"Installation time at the gallery has begun and we have been surrounded by a mass of crates, fork lifts, scissor lifts and strong men," reads the most recent update on the White Rabbit gallery website.

"As the artworks have been unloaded, the excitement has been creeping up in us all here at the White Rabbit! Only a few short weeks to go until we are open to the public, so stay posted everyone."

Such a pity the atmosphere for shareholders is a touch muted after the profit warning. Hate to think Kerr might drop something valuable in the set-up.

Still, plenty more where that came from.

Caught in a bind

Spare a thought for poor old John Alexander. Might not be another pink slip just yet.

Should James Packer still bear the enmity of his father to the Stokes camp, there's now precious little chance of JA's scoring another $15 million payout from the next scheme of arrangement to make him "redundant".

After all, Stokes now has Packer up against the wall.

With Packer selling everything from boats and choppers to cows and polo ponies to horde readies as his gambling business gets the yips, Stokes has punted there's every chance Packer has been sniffing around ways of quitting his ConsMedia stake. So Stokes has blocked the door.

Consider: to select his preferred buyer, say, a Murdoch, Packer would have to use a scheme of arrangement but would be unable to vote his 38 per cent Consolidated Press Holdings stake.

He would need the support of 50 per cent of all shareholders and 75 per cent of shares voted in favour. But with Stokes now in a position to vote almost 20 per cent of shares against it, the chance of Packer getting his preferred buyer is, um, not good.

If Packer truly doesn't want to sell to Stokes particularly at a blush-inducing discount to the $4.80 he wanted from Lachlan Murdoch last year the only way he will be able to exit is to sell to institutional buyers.

And guess where the stock will then end up? It might take a few years but what money another successful grab for control by Stokes without even launching a takeover?

But back to JA. If he's ever, er, short of lunch money he could always borrow some from Perpetual, which pocketed $90 million from the sale of half its stake.

Not easy in academia

That's the problem when you walk out of the white hot boilerhouse of helping to run the country's competition policy and ascend the ivory towers of academia.

If you are Stephen King (the new guru of economics at Monash University, not the author of horror books) you suddenly become a believer in flights of fancy that earn you the amusing scorn of your former boss.

Such was the response of the competition tsar Graeme Samuel when he read the news in the Herald that King, his former fellow commissioner in charge of merger policy, had suggested the Government set up a "people's bank" as part of an inquiry into the banking industry.

Samuels remarked to his audience at a business shindig at Shangri-La de Da Hotel in Sydney yesterday that he just had to phone King and rib him about signing up to "academic fantasies" six months or so after leaving the ACCC.

(That and the company he was keeping with the five other economic types who apparently are not normal bedfellows in the theories they hold).

Apparently, the prof was somewhat dismayed that coverage of the letter signed by him and the others focused more on the socialist-style money-lending idea than the more important issue of the GFC's impact on competition in the banking industry.

Still, in channelling Oscar Wilde, Samuel might also have noted that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

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