Home / Business, sport, charity and Mosman dominate the gongs

Led by Gillian Broadbent, former Bankers Trust executive, busy non-executive director and Reserve Bank alumnus, the financial services industry once again contributed several high-powered figures to the Australia Day honours list.

Broadbent received the highest honour of the group, Companion of the Order of Australia, an AC. She was already an Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia, an AO.

Now 70, Broadbent in recent years has devoted much of her time to the climate change problem, chairing the Clean Energy Finance Corporation until 2017. When at BT in the 1990s, she and husband Olev Rahn, a famous asset allocator for the firm and one of a small group which picked the 1987 crash, made one of the industry’s power couples.

Each member of the group of honoured figures has contributed considerably to various charitable organisations. Three have also been prominent in sport, often linking the two, and three also hold the distinction of living in the leafy seaside Sydney suburb of Mosman. Mosman this year tops the postcode list for holding the country’s most new honours recipients: 11. It was followed by Sydney’s Hunters Hill and Woolwich combined, with nine, and Melbourne’s South Yarra, with eight. The Mosman dwellers are:

• John McMurtrie, now a Member in the General Division of the Order of Australia, an AM, who is the chief executive of Link Group and a former chief executive of UBS Australia. He qualifies as a big sports supporter too, as an active Swans benefactor, and charities the Chappell Foundation and the LBW Trust as well as Sydney’s Wayside, an important helper of the inner-city homeless
• Peeyush Gupta AM, a founder of wealth manager and advisory group ipac, now a part of AMP, and in recent years another active non-executive director. One of his current roles is as a director of McMurtrie’s Link Group. Another is as director of National Australia Bank, and
• Andrew Pridham AO, the chair of investment bank Moelis, and chair of the Sydney Swans. He gained additional kudos, at least in Mosman, for last year smashing the suburb’s house price record when he paid $25 million for his new home.

Among the other financial services types are: Karl Morris AO, the chair of broker Ord Minnett, chair of the Brisbane Broncos and prominent supporter of the Catholic Church in Brisbane; Roger Massy-Greene AM, executive chair of Eureka Capital Partners and director of Illawarra Coke Co and OneVentures; Mike Fitzpatrick OA, private equity and infrastructure manager and former AFL chair; Richard Haddock AM, former chief of BNP Bank and chair of St Vincent’s Curran research foundation; Alex Gottshall OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia in the General Division), who runs his own finance-orientated PR firm and is a big supporter of charities such as the Salvation Army; and, Adele Ferguson AM, a Fairfax investigative journalist who has broken stories on several of the industry’s scandals in recent years.

– G.B.