Ken Parker

"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."

"enemy more easily, Fairfax’s directors had sacrificed an irretrievable asset in their rush to defend the Herald & Weekly Times against Murdoch. As Stokes and the wily Ken Parker would find out, Fairfax had held a unique advantage for a decade: it enjoyed what was dubbed the ‘grandfathering’ exemption from media laws passed in the 1960s to prevent any one owner from controlling three television licences. Because Fairfax already owned interests in television stations in Brisbane, Sydney and Canberra — and what Stokes calls ‘a cobweb of interlaced shareholdings in regional TV stations’ — before the legislation was passed in 1969, it was allowed to retain the three capital city licences. Latecomers had to be content with two. By buying a 15 per cent stake in the Herald & Weekly Times to fight off Murdoch’s apparent raid, they had breached the ‘grandfather’ clause — and, in effect, would be forced to sell either QTQ-9 in Brisbane or CTC-7 in Canberra. Not only had Fairfax breached the rules, and in doing so abandoned an edge it enjoyed in the media marketplace, but it had also borrowed a fortune to do it. With Potter Partners leading the stampede, Fairfax had spent $50 million on 9.5 million HWT shares. Queensland Press had spent $20 million. Hindsight would show that in doing so they had both squandered the contents of their war chests — paying too much for newspapers that had reached their peak of influence and profitability and were now blundering towards a cliff no-one could then imagine, let alone see. Later, Stokes would link the decline of the once great house of Fairfax with this panicky response to the first Murdoch raid."

"Most deals rely more on relationships between the parties than on money alone, he says. This lesson had been reinforced when he’d dealt with Fairfax to buy their television station. He’s sure they would have ignored the uncouth Perth shopping centre man if Ken Parker hadn’t quietly introduced him to the venerable Sir Vincent Fairfax, who decided he would pass muster. ‘Most things don’t get done only for money,’ he says. ‘Money has to be there but it’s not always the highest price. Quite often you need something else as well.’"