Alan Bond

"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."

"Around the time Stokes had arrived in Perth, another young entrepreneur had tried something that had caught many people’s attention. His name was Alan Bond. He had bought rural land cheaply at a place called Lesmurdie, on hills overlooking the city. Bond called it Lesmurdie Heights Estate and advertised his subdivision on television. In one weekend he and his wife Eileen took so many cash deposits she would later compare it with ‘selling fish and chips’."

"In January 1987 Stokes was moored off Rottnest Island when the time came to call Kerry Packer and bid on Nine. He paddled a dinghy to shore and queued in his shorts and thongs to use a telephone box to ring Packer in Sydney. He didn’t have any change, so had to make a reverse-charge call. He knew what Alan Bond was offering. ‘I’ll offer 50 cents more than Alan Bond if I can get some support from you,’ he recalls telling Packer. By ‘support’ he meant a break on programming costs, which Packer could control because he had long-standing deals with American production houses. Stokes also suggested he would be a more stable owner for Nine than Bond. Packer grudgingly agreed, but it didn’t help. That night the news broke that Bond had offered another $1 a share, putting his total bid above the billion-dollar mark. It was an offer Packer could not refuse and Stokes would not match, especially the extra $50 million of borrowed money he says Bond grafted on top of the agreed price, like a cherry on a cake. The two Kerrys sat back to wait for Bond to implode. Watchers weren’t sure where the extra $50 million went but some speculated most of it would find its way back to Bond. He was clever like that."

"For Lowy, the BDC deal wrapped up a national network of television and radio stations that Stokes estimates cost a total of $1.2 billion. Kerry Packer had said you get only ‘one Alan Bond in a lifetime’, but getting a temporarily dazzled Lowy wasn’t bad."

"Once he’d worked it out on paper he contacted James Yonge, his former workmate at IPC in Sydney. Yonge now ran Wardley Australia, the merchant banking arm of Hong Kong Bank of Australia. He’d put funding together for several leading Australian and New Zealand entrepreneurs, including John Elliott, Alan Bond and Colin Reynolds, and was one of Australia’s leading merchant bankers.[13](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-13)"