Stokes

"Jack Bendat & Associates built and refurbished Consolidated Properties’ property assets until Bendat and Stokes set up a building division under another name. In 1973, CPI took over Modernair, which handled the huge air-conditioning contracts needed for the shopping centres. They expanded it to handle all the other elements used in commercial-scale air-conditioning: sheet metal, heavy steel and copper piping, fibreglass ducts and so on."

"As D’Arcy would describe the manoeuvre, when the market opened that Monday, Murdoch bid $4 a share for shares that had been trading at $2.70. He made it known he was looking for half of the 63 million Herald shares on issue, and commissioned JBWere to buy them. Millions of shares changed hands, but by the end of the day Murdoch realised he could not force his way into controlling the company because Queensland Press and Fairfax were playing ‘white knight’ to rescue the Herald & Weekly Times. Fairfax mainly wanted to protect its interest in The Age, which far preferred to maintain its cosy competition with the Herald & Weekly Times than with a hostile News Limited. Stokes would later comment, ‘Egos made strange bedfellows.’ Fairfax threw millions at the market and secured enough shares to rebuff Murdoch, but made what Stokes calls a ‘technical error’ of flagging their intentions ahead. While the rescuers were buying with both hands, eyes wide shut, Murdoch sold them a dummy. Suddenly and silently, he started selling — but not through JBWere, the firm that had done the buying for him. Instead, he quietly briefed another stockbroker, May & Mellor. Before anyone at Flinders Street — or at Fairfax’s Sydney office or Queensland Press — realised what was happening, May & Mellor had quietly unloaded Murdoch’s 3.5 million Herald shares at a premium: $5.52 per share. By midday of day two, the shares had slid back to $3.75 and Murdoch had announced he was out of the race, at least for the time being. But he had made $3 million cash between breakfast and lunch."

"The first steps were to find out who was handling the fire sale and establish what the tower had cost to build — and how much less would buy it. The answer to the question of what the building had cost was about $US240 million, most of it still owed to the mortgage holders because the building’s backers were in more trouble than General Custer. Construction had finished in 1986, just in time for the 1987 crash, which had poleaxed the Texas economy. The Stokes camp reasoned if they could buy the tower for less than $200 million it had to be a bargain because, they assumed, it was far less than replacement cost. When they did the deal for $178 million Stokes was delighted — except for one detail that swiftly assumed great importance. He had requested a guarantee that if he wanted to quit the tower he could offload it back to the seller for a minimum of $150 million — but in the hurly-burly of doing the deal in New York, Stokes’s chief negotiator had taken a verbal assurance as a binding promise."