Australian Capital Equity

"Stokes didn’t want to send the old station to the knackers and start again but he did want to know how best to groom it. He commissioned Ogilvy & Mather’s Perth marketing agency to do the job. They came up with an award-winning campaign, pitched to Stokes over coffee and sausage rolls in the boardroom. The pitch was to rename the station Capital 7 and the company as Australian Capital Television, a natural play on the acronym of the Australian Capital Territory. Almost as an afterthought, the agency also suggested Stokes call his holding company Australian Capital Equity — ACE."

"Knox says the joke at Australian Capital Equity head office was that he became the ‘Minister for Crap Incorporated’. It was a backhanded compliment: he was called in to help patch up stray business ventures so they could be saved and sold or, if hopeless, quietly strangled. At Stokes’s behest, he and Parker would later also work behind the scenes to help Stokes’s oldest children, Raelene and Russell."

"On their last day in Japan, Stokes and Rayner were having a meal when some young Japanese students asked them if they could practise their English with them. The two men obliged. Stokes asked one of the students what her plans were for the future and she said to study English and become a professional translator. He asked what it would cost to do the course; the answer (in yen) was about $2500. Stokes pulled out his unused travellers’ cheques and handed over $2500, a lot of money in Japan with the exchange rate at about 380 yen to the dollar. Rayner was shaking his head. Stokes told him: ‘We’ve had a great trip so let’s leave a bit behind.’ The student took his business card and the cheques and thanked him and he didn’t think of it again. Twenty years later a brown-paper parcel the size of a shoebox arrived at Australian Capital Equity’s office in Perth. Assistant Kathy Bohn opened it cautiously. Inside was a huge pile of Japanese currency and a note from the student. It said, in fluent English, that many years earlier the sender had borrowed $2500 from Stokes to pursue her language studies and that it had changed her life. She had met and married her husband at college and now they both had successful careers as translators for big companies. The cash added up to $12,000. The exchange rate had tumbled from 380 yen to 75 to the dollar. Stokes had done bigger deals but not many better ones, and he’d only been trying to help."

"Stokes was in the United States regularly, having set up an Australian Capital Equity branch in Texas, largely to oversee the campaign to lease or sell the Dallas skyscraper. On one trip he invited Caterpillar decision makers ‘to have a heart-to-heart’ in his splendid office in the refurbished tower, by now called Fountain Place and winning international architecture awards but not enough high-paying tenants. Whatever Stokes said worked: Caterpillar agreed to take the franchise from Morgan and give it to him."

"Being Columbo incognito can have small drawbacks. One dry season in Broome a few years ago, an alert bank teller telephoned Australian Capital Equity in Perth to say a weather-beaten man wearing shorts and a T-shirt was attempting to cash a small personal cheque in the name of ‘Kerry Stokes’. The mystery man was, in fact, Kerry Stokes. At that stage he’d owned the best house on the coast for nearly twenty years and before that was joint proprietor in a dozen huge cattle stations in the Kimberley. He could have raised a cheque to buy the entire town but he didn’t even raise his voice. He likes to see people doing their jobs properly and has never wanted to be recognised in the street."