The Forrests have secretly intervened in AACo’s Joe Lewis headache
It was some seriously coincidental timing when the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped its bombshell allegations against Joe Lewis on Wednesday. Among the claims being pursued in New York courts is that the British billionaire attempted to help two pilots who flew his private jet make a motza off insider information he had obtained about AACo.
AACo, meanwhile, held its annual meeting one day later.
Lewis owns 51 per cent of the ASX-listed pastoral empire. But he is far from the only billionaire involved. Tattarang, the investment vehicle owned by Andrew and Nicola Forrest, has recently emerged as a shareholder, with an 18.5 per cent holding partly acquired from the Holmes a Court family.
Joe Lewis leaves a New York court this week. Bloomberg
Tattarang, sources told Street Talk, wrote to the AACo board after the charges against Lewis in New York were first reported. It wanted the scheduled annual meeting, in Brisbane, to be delayed. That would presumably have given Forrest and other shareholders more time to consider whether they should vote for the re-election of Lewis’ directors – Shehan Dissanayake, a managing director at the billionaire’s Tavistock Group, and Sarah Gentry, the investment vehicle’s vice-president.
Then there’s the question of the company’s remuneration report. Tattarang lodged its proxy votes well in advance of the annual meeting, blissfully unaware of the looming allegations to be made about their co-investor.
Dissanayake is close to Lewis, a reclusive businessman who now lives in Bermuda and rarely speaks to the media. His last interview – with The New York Times – was in 1998. The Forrests, with a large pastoral portfolio of their own, have not exactly been vocal about AACo in the past
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