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Over a $90,000 dispute, Richard White’s down $3b and counting
At what point did WiseTech investors start counting the founder’s
libido as a contingent liability?
Myriam RobinRear Window editor
Oct 23, 2024
The share price is instructive. News of White’s now-settled attempt to have ex-lover Linda Rogan made bankrupt broke on October 1 and was part of a modest 1.7 per cent WiseTech share price drop.
Richard White’s personal life didn’t matter to investors … until it did.
Oscar Colman
Further details, including the fact that White bought a house for Rogan and her
claims that he’d offered investment in return for sex, shaved off another 3
per cent. Though the share price veered higher after.
The thing that started WiseTech’s share price falling again was a story in The Australian revealing
another woman who claimed she’d befriended White over LinkedIn, only to be
presented with a sex toy hidden in a bouquet (smooth).
The sell-off gathered furious pace with further revelations in this
newspaper (with The Age
and Sydney Morning Herald)
of other affairs (consummated and attempted), as well as the considerable
governance ruptures that had taken place on WiseTech’s board. The share price
plunged nearly 15 per cent at Monday’s open and hasn’t recovered since.
Wednesday revealed White had – while much of this was going on – also
conducted a long-standing affair with a WiseTech employee, which ended around
the time his current wife
Zena Nasser came on the scene. And who could be sure this is
the end of it?
All up, in three weeks and 16 trading sessions, some $8 billion has vanished
from WiseTech’s market capitalisation.
White owns a little more than a third of the company, and so is some $3
billion poorer. He tried to bankrupt Rogan, seemingly at Nasser’s urging, over
a disputed $90,000.
As a risk – capable of unravelling the polite silence that had to that point
cloaked his liaisons – the decision to serve Rogan with a bankruptcy notice was
a spectacularly bone-headed one.
We don’t know how White bore it. By
his own telling, he’s a contingency planner, uncomfortable with
uncertainty, circumspect and cautious.
“I’ve either spent time ensuring there are no risks or I’ve got plans when
the risks happen,” the logistics software tycoon said in a June interview with
this publication. “It’s not something that I go, ‘Oh well, I don’t know if this
will work, but I’ll give it a crack.’ I’m not like that at all. I don’t do that
at all.”
Alas, no one ever scored without chancing rejection. White’s clearly learned
to modify his instincts where other needs prevail.
The other theory is that this is just what the former roadie thinks “making
it” looks like. After all, spending enough time around sexually ravenous rock
stars can do that to you, and White has repaired guitars for rockers like AC/DC
and The Angels.
There seems little confluence between that life and his current one. Apart
from one thing.
Myriam Robin is Rear Window editor based in the Melbourne
newsroom. A Rear Window columnist since 2017, she previously reported on
financial markets and media. Connect
with Myriam on Twitter. Email Myriam at myriam.robin@afr.com
$75M FRENCH SEIZURES
Authorities seized an estimated $75 million of French Riviera real estate and
luxury cars as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering linked to
two Russian businessmen with Cypriot citizenship: Ruslan Goryukhin and Mikhail
Opengeym. Opengeym appeared in ICIJ’s 2021 Pandora Papers, while Goryukhin
formerly headed a construction company founded by Arkady Rotenberg, an ally of
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
‘HISTORIC’ $3B BANK
PENALTY
The U.S. arm of TD Bank has agreed to pay what has been described as an
“historic” $3 billion in penalties to settle criminal and civil cases with
multiple U.S. authorities, over allegations the bank failed to stop criminal
networks passing hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit funds through their
accounts.
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