Crash as Shopping Spree

“In late October 1987, as fortunes were crashing all around him, Stokes was reported to be one of the few millionaires buying art at Christie’s first post–financial crash art sale. He paid $8000 for a rare letter relating to Australia’s discovery and $6000 for an early map of the country, as well as record prices at auction for works by William Dargie, Leonard French and Albert Namatjira. A week later at Sotheby’s he bought another Leonard French work, and one by Arthur Boyd. Stokes had arrived on the other side of the crash with his fortune, and his reputation, intact, cashed up and ready to benefit by picking over the wreckage of others’ empires. In January 1988, he bought a St Georges Terrace building from the West Australian State Superannuation Fund for $20 million. On 20 October he moved offshore, buying a $212 million office block in Dallas, Texas, and announcing plans to build another, each the size of the premium properties in Sydney. The next year he bought the Perth Entertainment Centre and 40 per cent of the Perth Wildcats basketball team.”

“Given the odour surrounding the name of Alan Bond, it isn’t surprising that when Bond took over Bell Group, and with it the Caterpillar dealership, the parent company in the United States announced that it would withdraw the franchise. Moving with characteristic ruthlessness, Caterpillar gave Bond only three months’ notice to come to an agreement with the newly anointed dealer: a US company, Morgan Equipment. The federal government was far from pleased. The treasurer, Paul Keating, issued a statement saying that the replacement of an Australian-owned with a foreign-owned company was ‘inconsistent with foreign investment guidelines’.20 Meanwhile, the Bell Group managing director, David Aspinall, described Caterpillar’s actions as ‘tantamount to rape’, and Bond announced his intention to challenge the validity of the termination notice in the Victorian Supreme Court.21 Stokes was at the time the majority owner and a director of a public company called Austrim, which was associated with the Nylex Group – manufacturers of clothes, fabrics, hoses and that Australian iconic brand, the Esky. While Morgan Equipment and Bond scrapped over the price for the dealership, Stokes and his fellow director and svengali Ken Parker manoeuvred for position. When the dust settled over the fight between Morgan Equipment and Bond, Austrim emerged owning 30 per cent of the franchise, with Morgan owning the other 70 per cent. Then, in the final weeks of the greedy decade it was announced that Austrim would sell its 30 per cent share in the dealership to Stokes’ ACE. Three weeks later, on 16 January 1990, the news was released that Stokes had bought the lot. He had paid Morgan Equipment’s owner Harold Morgan $50 million for the whole company, including the Caterpillar dealership. The Caterpillar head office clearly smiled on the deal: there was no suggestion of their revisiting the ownership of the franchise. Stokes smoothly slipped in.”