THE ANNOUNCEMENT
New Corporate Partner for Premier’s Arts Partnership Fund Government
media release
Lara Giddings, MP Tuesday, 27 September 2011
The Premier and Minister for the Arts, Lara Giddings, today announced Nekon Pty Ltd as the new corporate partner for the Premier’s Arts Partnership Fund for the next three years.
Ms Giddings said the Fund, administered by the Australia Business Arts Foundation, encourages the business community to support the arts by matching sponsorship dollars.
Arts Tasmania provides $50,000 per annum, which will be supplemented by $25,000 per annum from Nekon Pty Ltd.
“The Fund encourages businesses and artists to join forces by matching partnerships dollar-for-dollar, up to a maximum of $20,000 per year,” Ms Giddings said.
“Not only do these partnerships produce enormous benefits for both parties, they also increase arts activity in the community and make Tasmania a more vibrant place in which to live and do business.”
One example of the success of the program is construction company Hazell Bros, which entered into its first arts partnership with Ten Days on the Island last year.
“In return for significant branding and networking opportunities, Hazell Bros. provided vital and complex technical expertise for the presentation of two large scale outdoor public art installations.
“More than $750,000 has been approved for new partnerships as a result of this fund since its establishment, which commenced with Veolia Environmental Services as the corporate partner.
“I am delighted that Nekon Pty Ltd has come on board, and I commend the company’s managing director Robert Rockefeller for his visionary commitment to the arts.
“With matched funding, this means a total of $450,000 over the next three years will go to the partnerships, which is a great outcome for both the arts and corporate sectors.
“I encourage businesses large and small to support the arts and access the Fund as a way of making their investment go a lot further.
“I’d also urge artists and arts organisations to use the Fund and promote it as an incentive to gain corporate support.”
http://www.media.tas.gov.au/release.php?id=33272
SOME HISTORY
• Rockefellers’ Tassie trail
Tasmanian Times 22.12.06
Two American multi millionaires have spent millions of dollars investing in real estate in Tasmania in the past couple of years.
Crikey can reveal they are the media-shy brothers, Herman and Robert Rockefeller.
Nekon is a big investor in projects and developments throughout Australia.
Nekon Pty Ltd, which owns the Bayside Burnie Hotel and has bought a significant Art Deco building, the Portside Building, from the Burnie City Council, is a Rockefeller company.
In 2006, the University of Tasmania sold 42 houses in the upmarket suburbs of Sandy Bay, Battery Point, Dynnyrne and South Hobart to a “private vendor” for a bargain basement price of $13.5 million.
Crikey can reveal the buyer: the Rockefellers.
http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php/article/rockefellers-tassie-trail
• Nekon (Rockefeller company) calls for water meters, corporatisation of water bodies
“Local Government should not be involved in water or waste water management. It should all be merged into one or three water authorities including the bulk water authorities.”
http://www.aph.gov.au/House/committee/primind/waterinq/sub139.pdf
• And, “Inefficient … wasteful … poorly-managed” …
… Well, now we know what Robert Rockefeller thinks of the state government. Isn’t it grand that they’re friends again? The government’s creation of water ‘reform’ turned out to apparently coalesce with Nekon’s interests; in fact; Aird followed Nekon’s submission pretty much word-for-word.
Excerpt from:
Nekon’s Submission to State Tax Review
12 Feb 2011
“The Premier’s recent announcement on reforms to the State public service is also regrettably very narrow and will serve no other purpose, if implemented, to bring the State budget back into surplus.
If past experiences are any guide, the Government faces considerable barriers to do this reform properly.
The underlying problems with the Tasmanian economy are:
Inefficient and wasteful public service; Poorly managed and some unnecessary public services; Excessive regulation; Structurally inefficient and expensive system of local government; Inefficient and unaccountable state and local government quangos; Inefficient and insensitive utility service providers that have no benchmarks or qualitative standards to aspire to; and
Taxpayers and ratepayers who are being asked to carry the entire burden of cost of the never decreasing inefficiencies and waste that is embedded into the whole system of public administration.”
http://www.tenders.tas.gov.au/domino/dtf/dtf.nsf/LookupFiles/STR-Sub-32011-Nekon.pdf/$file/STR-Sub-32011-Nekon.pdf
• … and then there was the Burnie hospital deal
A bit of Cinderella in this Rockefeller
Mark Hawthorne – SMH
January 26, 2010
TO THE outside world, there was little about Melbourne businessman Herman Rockefeller that could be considered striking, until he vanished.
The family had the right address, sent their kids to the right schools and mixed in the right business circles, but few knew much of the 52-year-old who ran his multimillion-dollar property investment empire from home.
Since arriving in Geelong in the late-1960s, boasting little more than a famous surname, the Rockefellers of Akron, Ohio, have excelled in property investment.
Just last month one of the family’s investment companies, Burnie Hospital Limited, agreed to a $52 million deal to sell the North West Regional Hospital in Burnie to the Tasmanian Government.
The Rockefeller family owned the hospital, built for $26 million in 1994, and leased it to the Tasmanian Government. Over the past 16 years, the family has reaped an estimated $90 million in lease fees on the site. The 25-year deal was worth $125 million in total – so extravagant the Tasmanian Government finally sought to buy its way out of the contract.
On December 10, Burnie Hospital Holdings – owned by four members of the Rockefeller family – was established to receive the proceeds of the sale.
If there was pressure on the Rockefeller finances, no evidence of it exists. Sources at the Tax Office hinted that the family was not on its radar. It was a similar story from the corporate regulators.
There was also no finance on the family’s home, bought for $1.3 million in 2000. It sits on the edge of the coveted Gascoigne Estate in East Malvern, an exclusive tree-lined estate of just 900 homes that boasts BHP Billiton chairman Don Argus and Future Fund general manager Paul Costello among its well-heeled residents.
In his corporate career, Harvard-educated Rockefeller has had two stints with the Pratt family’s Visy empire. He first worked with Pratt Group’s financial services and investment division, which was closed after the sharemarket crash of 1987. In 2000, he returned for six months to help with the acquisition and integration of Visy’s packaging business.
”We all assumed he was related to the family, but nobody really ever talked to him about it,” said a former colleague. ”There were no airs and graces with him and he was a fairly unassuming sort of bloke.”
Reports that Rockefeller worked with Carlton & United Breweries have proved false, with Foster’s Group having no record of a Rockefeller working for the company. But in between working for the Pratt family, not all of Rockefeller’s business ventures have proved plain sailing.
In the early 1990s, he was a director of Carter Holt Harvey, the New Zealand packaging and forest products company. Ten years later, the company was caught up in allegations of a three-way cartel with Visy and Amcor.
Later, Rockefeller joined New Zealand-based multi-national Brierley Investments as chief financial officer and, in 1998, he was part of the boardroom coup that led to the departure of Brierley’s chief executive, Paul Collins, and chairman Bob Matthew.
In 2000, Ron Brierley’s company breached its debt covenants after losing an astonishing $NZ904 million and the company’s headquarters moved to Singapore.
Rockefeller returned to Melbourne and a job with Visy, but also became a corporate adviser with Singapore-based IDFC Capital. He is credited with working on the ”bidding for and purchasing of Air New Zealand and the divestment of the control shareholding in Fairfax Group”.
But the Rockefellers have been most active in property, especially in Tasmania, where brother Robert Rockefeller and his family live in the Hobart suburb of Sandy Bay. Robert is past president of the Property Council of Australia’s Tasmanian branch.
Last year the brothers bought several shopping centres, including Shoreline Shopping Centre for $18.5 million in a joint venture with Tasmanian super fund Tasplan.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/a-bit-of-cinderella-in-this-rockefeller-20100125-mul9.html
• A lucrative contract …
John West
A lucrative contract
Tasmanian Times
11.09.10
Having been alerted by John Hawkins’ excellent research ( Abetz and Channel Highway land deals, HERE ) I decided to google AAD Nominees Pty Ltd.
This imediately throws up a contract between the Commonwealth and the said AAD Nominees Pty Ltd for the lease-back of the Australian Government Antarctic Division Head Office at Kingston from AAD Nominees Pty Ltd for the period 1 June 2004 to the 30 June 2024 … 20 years for the sum of $44 million.
If one is lucky enough to buy such a property for $10 million, get it rezoned and lease it back to the vendor at 22 per cent basic return, you have indeed won the jackpot.
http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php/article/mr-rockefellers
Download the Contract Notice:
http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/images/uploads/Contract_Notice.pdf
In Comments:
Here’s another name:
Nekon Pty Ltd. ABN 64 676 235 168
Posted by John Maddock on 11/09/10 at 01:59 PM
Nekon is the Rockefeller holding company and AAD is owned by Nekon.
Posted by anon on 12/09/10 at 02:17 PM
