Born Lucky: Stars Align Perfectly for PM’s Son with Mammoth Bet on Wind Power Outfit Infigen

Life is a lottery. And lottery winners are a mixed bag.

Sometimes it’s that battler from Bundaberg who scoops the jackpot, immediately pays off the mortgages of his mates and buys five identical V8 Holden Commodores.

On other occasions, the lottery was won at birth. Sometimes the advantage of parentage is immediate and other times chance and serendipity combine with ancestry to provide windfall opportunities that would ordinarily be deprived to others.

There is, of course, nothing insidious about parents seeking to smooth the path for their offspring. Indeed, that’s part of every parent’s obligation.

Insofar as life is a gamble, so is investing in the great wind power fraud.

Take Babcock & Brown which, having disintegrated in 2009, became Infigen.

As an investment ‘prospect’, the Infigen story has been all about bleeding cash.

It backed up a $55 million loss in 2011/12 with an $80 million loss in 2012/13 and kept losing money: booking a $9 million loss in 2013/14; and racked up a whopping $304 million loss in 2014/15.

In an effort to spin away its losses in 2013/14, Infigen pointed to …. wait for it … the wind – as the reason for a massive drop in revenues (as pitched to wind worshippers, ruin-economy).

In the mother of all ironies, Infigen tried to brush off its monumental $304 million loss for 2014/15 by blaming “particularly poor wind conditions” (the pitch again appearing on the pages of that august journal, ruin-economy).

During its first incarnation as Babcock and Brown, these boys fleeced investors and creditors to the tune of something like $10 billion (while its directors pocketed – and somehow managed to retain – 10s of $millions at creditors’ and investors’ expense).

Having spectacularly crashed and burned, Babcock and Brown then shamelessly phoenixed into Infigen. In 2015 it was all set to do it all over again: its losses continued to pile up, it continued to bleed cash, its share price continued to head in a general Southerly direction and its mountain of debt looked insurmountable (see our posts here and here).

In a last ditch attempt to forestall its brewing Babcock and Brown reprise, Infigen put its US wind farms on the block back in January 2015, hoping to scoop up $500 million for the lot, as reported by Reuters:

Australian wind farm operator Infigen Energy Ltd is exploring the sale of 18 U.S. wind farms, worth about A$500 million ($409 million), so they escape impact from the uncertain future of Australian state rebates for renewable energy firms.

But, as with everything Infigen plugs, its stated aims look more like ‘dreams’, which – as every one in creditor and investor land knows – don’t often translate into satisfied debts or realised profits. Instead of bagging $500 million, it managed to pocket a little over half that.

Now, with that track record it would be a very bold punter indeed who would throw their own, or even someone else’s, money at Infigen.

Defying the odds, the Prime Minister’s son, Alex Turnbull did just that.

And his timing was impeccable, if not uncanny.

https://stopthesethings.com/2017/03/13/born-lucky-stars-align-perfectly-for-pms-son-with-mammoth-bet-on-wind-power-outfit-infigen/

A Liberal loss would cause instability, says PM

But Mr Morrison claimed a Liberal Party loss in next weekend's Wentworth by-election would cause "unnecessary instability" because his party would no longer hold the majority of federal seats.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-13/liberals-fall-behind-in-wentworth-by-election-poll/10373508