Coe & Co.
Paul Barry
The Monthly | The Monthly Essays | May 2010 | Add a Comment
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David Coe is one of the smartest financiers in Australia. And by most accounts he’s a lovely guy. He’s friendly and charming, fun to be with, and an all-round top bloke, or so they say. He’s also a benefactor of the arts and has given generously to charity, helping to raise millions of dollars for the Sydney Children’s Hospital.
Coe’s best mate, Gordon Fell, is just as bright and another paragon of virtue. The former Rhodes scholar, who made his millions selling property to super-fund investors, was a director of the Smith Family, chairman of Opera Australia and a trustee of Sydney Grammar School until his empire imploded in early 2008. “There’s no way he’s a shonk,” one of his advisers assured me.
So here’s the puzzle. How could these two world-class charmers be responsible for two of Australia’s biggest corporate disasters, in which almost $10 billion, belonging to shareholders and creditors, went down the gurgler? And how come they have hung on to tens of millions of dollars while the mums and dads who backed them lost everything? Come to think of it, why is that so often the story in the corporate world?