Macquarie Group chief executive Nicholas Moore
Crikey is going to build a supplementary Rich List to the Fairfax offering, which puts families and individuals together and works with a lower threshold of $200 million. Here are the first seven entries who were not mention in Friday’s 2017 AFR Rich List.
Bassat brothers: Paul and Andrew Bassat founded Seek.com with the support of the Rockman family and created a multinational powerhouse now capitalised at more than $6 billion. Andrew remains the sole CEO to this day and owns shares worth about $250 million, while Paul also made more than $150 million out of his Seek shares and has proven to be a successful venture capitalist as well. Together we reckon they are worth about $500 million.
Nicholas Moore: anyone who has been paid $33 million in one year is seriously rich, and Macquarie Bank’s long-serving CEO has been raking in the huge dollars for 20 years. The latest annual pay packet was valued at $18.7 million, although much of this is in equity bonuses, which are ultimately performance related. You can see the long-term value of these in the disclosed equity holdings (p 45 of the latest annual report) of 2.1 million ordinary shares, worth $187 million at current prices and 834,463 performance shares, worth another $73.8 million. Valuing Nicholas Moore at about $400 million relies on assuming Macquarie Group shares will stay strong and that he’s invested his non-Macquarie wealth wisely. The annual dividend on his shareholding is pushing $10 million, so the non-Macquarie wealth is piling up.
Denis O’Neil: With roots back to Hymix concrete, this Sydney fortune has long been ignored by Fairfax. O’Neil has built up a solid property portfolio including a Cairns hotel, numerous Sydney apartments in his completed developments, including Observatory Tower, The Rex in Kings Cross and Sydney Park. He also purchased the Point Piper and Rose Bay Marina and sold his Bellevue Hill mansion for $30 million in 2013 . When you consider that the $300 million sale of Hymix to Pioneer was widely reported in 1999, his exclusion from the Fairfax Rich List is hard to fathom. However, he did drop $8 million on Cascade Coal and failed in a 2015 court bid to recover the money.
Paul Ramsay Foundation: Just because Paul Ramsay had no heirs when he died doesn’t mean his $3 billion healthcare fortune just disappears. It is now the biggest philanthropic fund in Australia and should still be noted on any Rich List because it is a huge pile of wealth attached to a particular family.
Dr Chris Roberts: With Cochlear shares at $148, the company’s former CEO is pushing hard for Rich List inclusion, based on our $200 million threshold. When Roberts resigned from the board in August 2015, he owned 710,849 shares, which, if retained today, are worth $156 million and generating about $1.8 million a year in dividends. Throw in cash salary payments of more than $20 million over the years plus a further 123,000 in-the-money option, and the former Cochlear boss is one of the five richest non-founder CEOs to have emerged through the public company system.
Murdoch family: Just because Rupert Murdoch is a US citizen doesn’t mean the world’s most powerful family should be excluded from Fairfax’s Australian Rich List. The family shareholdings in News Corp and 21st Century Fox are worth more than $8 billion, and there is easily at least another $1 billion-plus sitting in Australia courtesy of the $600 million payment by Rupert to his three Australian-based sisters in the 1990s, plus the US$600 million payment from Rupert to his four adult children almost 10 years ago as part of Rupert’s divorce settlement with second wife Anna.
Barro family: Crikey gave BRW stick in 2005 for ignoring the Barro family, which duly appeared on the 2006 Rich List with a valuation of $450 million. Patriarch David Barro subsequently passed away, but his children continue to run the large Melbourne-based quarry and concrete business, which owns a 35% stake in Adelaide Brighton, currently worth $1.25 billion.
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