Pod Insights ABC Rewind 01 | Skase | The Confidence Man About this episode Christopher Skase wants to be a corporate cowboy. He’s handsome and elegant, with Hermes ties and flowing locks. His wife Pixie is beautiful, in a 1980s kind of way, with bouffant blonde hair and more diamonds than a high street jeweller. Together they take on the Melbourne business establishment and start building the Qintex empire.
Transcript 4,189 words · 14 speakers
0:03 Speaker 00 It's Thursday the 13th of June 1991, and billionaire tycoon Christopher Skyes is in a Gold Coast nursing home. No, he's not a resident, he's in hiding. Just two years ago, he'd made a bid to buy a Hollywood film studio for $2 billion, but now, he's trying to escape the country.
0:28 Speaker 00 He's figured no one will look for him here while he's waiting for his next signal. When it comes, in the dead of night, it's time for him to make his final move.
0:38 Speaker 01 Two cars go to the airport. One was a decoy, and one carried Skyes himself. And it's this highly-planned subterfuge to get out of the country, so he wouldn't have to face court.
0:51 Speaker 00 In one of the greatest escapes Australia has ever seen, Christopher Skyes skips the country.
0:59 Speaker 00 Once the glamour couple of 1980s Australia...
1:02 Speaker 02 Getting an invitation to a Skyes party was prized real estate. Everyone wanted to be seen with them.
1:08 Speaker 00 Christopher and his wife Pixie are now pariahs.
1:12 Speaker 02 They'd gone from being the it couple. Everybody wanted a part of that. And then they didn't. They were persona non grata.
1:21 Speaker 00 How has it all gone so terribly wrong? Eighteen months ago, Christopher Skyes's business empire, Quintex, had dramatically collapsed. It was the largest corporate collapse in Australian history. Skyes owes creditors more than $170 million. At the peak of his wealth, Christopher Skyes owned the luxury mirage resorts, TV stations, a footy club. But now, it's all over. Christopher and Pixie have done a runner. The courts have labelled him a fugitive. No one knows where he is. And his companies owe $1.5 billion. The Australian media, the courts, the public, they're all out for Skyes's blood.
2:06 Speaker 00 If he'd just stayed around to face the music, well, we'll never know what might have happened. Instead, over the next 10 years, Skyes will go to extraordinary, ridiculous lengths to avoid facing justice. Countless arms of government will bend over backwards and spend millions to get him back to Australia.
2:26 Speaker 03 If you say you're innocent, why don't you come back and prove it?
2:28 Speaker 04 Now the authorities may be about to catch up with Skyes.
2:31 Speaker 03 The government won't give up.
2:34 Speaker 00 And the media will try every trick in the book to chase Skyes down. The famous Today Tonight Skyes chase story? They'll even try a few tricks out of the book.
2:43 Speaker 03 Andrew Denton's chase for Skyes. The chase for Skyes will grind on.
2:49 Speaker 00 He had it all: money, power, fame. And through hubris, poor decisions, bad luck, outright misconduct, whatever it was, it slipped right through his fingers. In the age of the con, could there be a lesson here for us all? If something seems too good to be true, it quite possibly is. I'm Mark Humphries and this is Skyes: Fall of a Tycoon. Episode 1, The Confidence Man: The Origin Story of Christopher Skyes.
3:45 Speaker 00 For me, Christopher Skyes was a public figure from my childhood who was physically absent from Australia and yet never far from our minds. There was so little vision of him that what did exist was played ad nauseam. Footage of him wading in a pool or being wheeled out in a wheelchair. These are the images that are stored in my early 90s memory bank alongside long lens photos of some guy sucking the toes of the Duchess of York. It was a different time. But spending his final years hiding away was surely not what Christopher had in mind when he started out in Melbourne, the business capital of 1960s Australia. Back then, fresh out of school, he goes by Chris, historian Quentin Beresford.
4:30 Speaker 01 When he was starting out, he was geekish, he was a bit of a loner, he was socially awkward, but dogged. And so his whole rise was calculated. He understood that as an outsider to a very stuffy Melbourne establishment, business, culture, he had to go and skill himself up in how businesses worked.
4:54 Speaker 00 What people don't see behind Chris's geeky, quiet exterior is this very calculated plan of action he's formulated to make it rich. Every step has a purpose. Step one is to get a job at a stockbroking firm, JB Weir, so he can learn about company takeovers. He does this for a few years before moving on to step two, working as a finance journalist. He lands a job at the Sun News Pictorial. This is fellow journo Stephen Bartholomew.
5:23 Speaker 05 Chris made it very clear that the reason he became a finance journalist was to create connections and contacts because he had this clear view that he wanted to be an entrepreneur. He wanted to be a corporate raider. And he thought finance journalism offered him the opportunity to meet the sort of people who would be helpful, which it did.
5:45 Speaker 00 In his four years in journalism, Chris specifically seeks out highly successful businessmen and asks them not just what he needs for the story, but what he wants to know about how to be successful. When he's learnt about as much as he can learn here, it's time for step three, moving into the business world. But you can't be an entrepreneur without money, and God knows you're not going to earn it from journalism. So with $15,000 from selling his share of a house, Skase convinces two other young corporate adventurers to form a company, Team Securities. Sure, it's not the sexiest of names, but this is a geek we're talking about. His business partners are more conservative, bring less cowboy energy than Chris,
6:27 Speaker 00 but they do bring much more money to the table than Skase. His job is to hunt down underperforming companies. The idea is to buy them up, spruce them up, and then sell them off for a profit quick, smart. Stephen Bartholomew is working in Skase's old job at the Sun News Victoria.
6:45 Speaker 05 The first investment he made was the Victoria Hotel, which was a rundown hotel in Little Collin Street at the time. I used to catch up with Chris once a month or so at the old Victoria Hotel. Chris was clearly ambitious. He was happy to talk about business. You very rarely got insights into his personal life. Then he bought a defunct Tasmanian mining company, Quintex Limited.
7:08 Speaker 00 Even back then, Skase has his eye on the luxury end of town, and he wants Team Securities to buy George's, Melbourne's famous fashion emporium. But his partners think the price is too high, and they don't share his taste for risk. The story goes that Skase calls them weak and gutless, and, this may shock you, that's the end of Team Securities. So, Skase takes a deep breath and goes it alone with Quintex. Now, if this dork is going to make it in the big leagues, he's going to have to stand out from the crowd and have the suits to match. Clearly, someone told him that the clothes make the man, because the Quintex Skase starts wearing flashy suits and bold designer ties.
7:53 Speaker 00 He's running with the rich young set, who like to party at the elite beachside hideaway of Portsea on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula. And it's around this time, Skase starts misbehaving with a married woman. She's pretty well-known in Melbourne, but her name is one the whole country will soon come to know: Pixie.
8:17 Speaker 00 Jennifer Kite is a young journalist at the time.
8:20 Speaker 06 Gosh, we knew of Pixie in Melbourne because, you know, the higher the hair, the closer to God. It couldn't be bigger than Pixie's blonde hair. Um, she was glamorous, she was groomed, she was polite, she was kind, and she was loyal. It was an extravagant time, but she had quality and class.
8:44 Speaker 00 Pixie leaves her husband, she and Chris become a thing, and he undergoes a calculated rebranding. Starts calling himself Christopher. That'll fool them. Quentin Beresford says Pixie elevates him from mere businessman to aspiring tycoon, a man of style and extravagance.
9:03 Speaker 01 Well, it was lucky you met her. She was the daughter of a Melbourne establishment business figure. She'd gone to an elite private school. Because she came from an establishment background, she understood really what you've got to do to get into business and make it. So, Skyes had developed all that kind of institutional knowledge, but really had none of the cachet for that world. I think Pixie added to his ambition, added to his self-confidence, and gave him the cachet and the debonair flair that everybody came to associate with Skyes.
9:41 Speaker 00 Christopher and Pixie get married, and he becomes an instant stepdad to her four daughters, whom he loves and who love him. He's her third husband, but he must be doing something right, because this time, it sticks.
9:59 Speaker 00 When you think of the 80s, you often think of the excesses. Big hair, shoulder pads, TV shows about extravagant lifestyles like Dynasty and Dallas. Well, the Skyes become the physical embodiment of this. And if I had to guess, I'd say Christopher in his white suit was channeling Mr. Rourke from Fantasy Island. I'll wait here if you need to Google that.
10:23 Speaker 02 Christopher and Pixie really burst onto the scene because of their unique look.
10:30 Speaker 00 In 1980s Victoria, Sue Smethurst is a teenager flicking through her nana's women's mags when she's struck by this Pixie woman.
10:38 Speaker 02 Pixie was the consummate corporate wife. There was more taffeta than you could ever imagine in your life. Those dresses were big, you know, we're talking leggarmutton sleeves and a mile length long and big skirts and lots of satin. He was tanned, he was always immaculately dressed, you know, dripping head to toe in designer outfits and this passion that they had for Hume's, everything.
11:05 Speaker 00 Quintex starts buying up companies that trade in luxury, but since Hermes is not for sale, they settle for a boutique Melbourne jeweller called Hardy Brothers. It seems like a strange business move for a wannabe corporate raider. It's not making any money, but it plays a big part in the marketing of Quintex and turns out to be a very savvy move. Pixie fancies herself as a designer and she brings her ideas to the look of the Hardy Brothers shop. Dick Gross is a finance commentator at the time.
11:38 Speaker 07 He made it glow. There was light spilling out and it was just alluring in a way that told us a lot about Skasey's ability to spin a story, create a picture and make the proseic look dazzling.
12:00 Speaker 00 Hardy Brothers literally makes the Melbourne Cup, like the actual cup. So on race day at Flemington, when the whole country's glued to the telly, there's Christopher Skasey holding up the handcrafted golden cup. It's marketing genius.
12:18 Speaker 00 But the Melbourne establishment, the investors in dark suits who control the money, they don't know much about this new young buck. He's not like them. They don't like his flashy approach and the smell of his new money. They don't trust him.
12:34 Speaker 01 The pretty stuffy Melbourne establishment wouldn't lend outsiders like him funds for takeovers. So again, he had to do it the hard way and carried that chip on his shoulder all his life and probably fed the ambition and the ego. He said many years later, "I got a cold shoulder from all over town." But doggedly, small company by small company, he built up a portfolio in this company here called Quintex.
13:00 Speaker 00 But Skase has a plan to win over these stuffy investors. He's going to get to them through their wives, with Pixie as the drawcard, because these ladies all want a piece of Pixie's glamour and style. So Skase, as those in his orbit now call him, invites the women to exclusive previews of Hardy Brothers' latest collections and lets them take home a diamond bracelet or French silk scarf. Skase knows they're going to go home, show their husbands and talk about what a great guy Christopher Skase is.
13:32 Speaker 01 What we're talking about here is the rise of what's called personal branding. A lot of the entrepreneurs of the 80s understood that what you had to project was outsized success. You project yourself as wealthy, as engaged in luxury.
13:50 Speaker 00 Pixie and Christopher know instinctively how to create a buzz around a product. It's a smart fast track to gaining commercial integrity and a gift he'll call upon time and time again.
14:01 Speaker 02 They were influencers before we ever knew that there was such a thing.
14:09 Speaker 00 Skyes keeps plugging away at his takeovers, small ones, like car dealerships. And all this while, from inner-city Melbourne, he's looking across the Nullarbor to Perth, where there's an emerging pack of entrepreneurs changing all the rules. They're the men who'll become known as the corporate cowboys, the risk-takers who'll rise big and fall hard. One of them has a hand in this iconic Australian moment.
14:44 Speaker 00 It's the moment Perth businessman Alan Bond wins the America's Cup yacht race. That morning, Australia is euphoric. Prime Minister Bob Hawke is at the wild celebrations in Fremantle and becomes every worker's best mate when he declares...
15:06 Speaker 00 You know, it must have been a time of excess when you could chuck a sickie over a millionaire's boat race. And I reckon, like the rest of Australia, Christopher Skyes is watching on that day thinking, "I want that." Maybe not the brashness of Bond, he'll never be that, but he wants the money, the social cachet, he wants to make his mark. Skyes wants in on the corporate cowboy club. He wants to run with these blokes who are raiding their way through the Australian stock market, Alan Bond, Robert Holmes Accord. They've captivated the public with their lavish lifestyles. But to get there too, Quintex needs bankers and investors to drink Skyes's Cool-Aid. Here's how Skyes sells himself.
15:48 Speaker 08 Do you see yourself as basically a takeover man?
15:51 Speaker 09 No, I see myself in three component parts, that of an investor, as a manager of investments, and thirdly, as a developer of businesses.
16:02 Speaker 00 With a personality like that, he certainly had his work cut out for him. But Skyes works hard. He's building a reputation outside the establishment. Then he meets this one banker in town who's also an outsider, Ian Johns. He runs the Tricontinental Bank. Johns and Skyes become great mates, and Tricontinental takes a gamble on him, lending Quintex $75 million. For such a huge amount of money, it ends up being surprisingly easy for Skyes to get his hands on it.
16:38 Speaker 00 This is Skyes's moment. He turns it up a notch. It's time to transform himself again into a media mogul. When Skyes was a teenager, he dreamed of being a radio DJ. But his dad had other ideas. He was a 1950s kind of DJ himself, pretty well-known in Melbourne, actually. And he said to Chris, "Son, you don't want to be on the radio station. You want to own the station." Skyes has taken that advice to heart.
17:08 Speaker 09 I like the media. It's a very exciting industry. It's the spontaneity of the industry that I like. The power I don't crave for.
17:16 Speaker 00 Sure, Chris. He starts with buying radio licences in Country Victoria and Queensland in the early 1980s. And then he moves on to TV stations. Back then, they're a licence to print money. So all the corporate cowboys are snapping them up. Alan Bond pays a whopping $1 billion for Channel 9 in Sydney and Melbourne. By 1987, at just 38 years old, Skyes has got the money to join the big boys. He swoops in and buys Channel 7 in Melbourne. Dermot O'Brien is running 7's newsroom at the time.
17:50 Speaker 10 Well, the 7 network had five owners in one year. And the second last owner was Fairfax.
17:59 Speaker 00 The Melbourne office is being run from Sydney, and not very well.
18:04 Speaker 10 Seventy-eight people were sacked. The journalists, we all went on strike. And the station was being outrated by Inspector Gadget on the ABC.
18:16 Speaker 00 So, much like Dr Claw, Skyes is gonna get you, Gadget.
18:23 Speaker 00 The day Skyes buys Channel 7, he sweeps into the Melbourne office, wearing that media mogul mantle with style.
18:30 Speaker 10 He hopped in a chopper, choppet into Melbourne. He was followed by the cameras. He had this alluring green tie. And with his boyish good looks, appeared like a Christ-like salvation.
18:45 Speaker 06 He was a very handsome entrepreneur. Christopher had the most beautiful hair.
18:51 Speaker 00 Jennifer Kite is 7's star newsreader in Melbourne. And like everyone, she's struck by his luscious locks. Heck, they were even more impressive than mine.
19:02 Speaker 06 I think it was something about the length. Not a lot of men executives, powerful executives in those days, had this sort of long hair that sort of flopped across the face, that he could just sort of push to the side. It was dead straight.
19:17 Speaker 00 But working in the media isn't just about having great hair. I mean, it is 90% of it, but it does require some actual skills. Back then, one of them was shorthand, a kind of written code. Shorthand classes were universally despised by journos, but they've given Dermot an in with his new boss.
19:36 Speaker 10 When we shook hands, I said to him, it's a long time since Mrs. Reedy's shorthand class at RMIT. And he said to me, Dermot, how has it been? And I said to him, it's been bloody awful. And he gave me a hug and he said, it is all finished. It is all finished.
19:56 Speaker 00 Skyes the Savior has arrived at Channel 7.
20:00 Speaker 10 Later that day, he addressed the staff and he painted a picture of what he planned to do. And he got cheers and applause like a football crowd. I think he brought a very, very dark period for that TV station to an end. And I'll never forget that.
20:19 Speaker 00 Jennifer Kite also remembers Skyes waltzing into the Melbourne office that day.
20:24 Speaker 06 He came with that cowboy energy, that he was doing big things. He said Fairfax were newspaper people. And he said, I'm an entrepreneur and I want to make 7 the strongest, biggest, most colourful, most successful network in the country. And he said, I want to get Darren Hinch to do a nightly show.
20:47 Speaker 00 In 1987, Darren Hinch is hosting a very popular radio show on Melbourne's 3AW. Darren's known as the human headline and the mouth from the south. He's notoriously outspoken, fearless in his journalism and in his contract negotiations.
21:02 Speaker 11 It was a Sunday and my wife Jackie Weaver and I were at home.
21:06 Speaker 00 Yes, the Australian film star Jackie Weaver.
21:09 Speaker 11 Skyes phones me up.
21:12 Speaker 11 And he makes an offer. And I said, nah, not enough. Um, nowhere near enough. You have to at least double that. And he hung up.
21:25 Speaker 00 Hinch runs over to Jackie and says,
21:27 Speaker 11 I've just either pulled off a great financial coup or I've gone broke, you know. And anyway, a couple of hours later, he phoned me back and, uh, and offered me a fortune. I mean, it was, this is back in the eighties, a million dollars a year or something, you know. A lot of it was in shares.
21:46 Speaker 00 Paid in Quintex shares. It's not really a payment, is it? But let's see how that pans out.
21:51 Speaker 11 And he said to me, and this won't mean much to younger Australians, but he said to me, I am going to make you the Walter Cronkite of Australia. And you believed him.
22:04 Speaker 00 Cronkite's a legendary American news anchor. So the mouth from the south certainly has big shoes to fill.
22:11 Speaker 11 He gave me incredibly, for journalism, the leeway to do it my way. And, and I did it my way and we, we got huge ratings and I, and I loved it.
22:24 Speaker 00 Well done, Darren. Skase is the news and now he owns the news. He wants to put his stamp on Channel 7. But behind every good man.
22:33 Speaker 06 He said, I want you to anchor the news. I did a secret audition with Sandy Roberts to be my co-anchor. And I thought that would have been an incredible combination. But in the end, they brought over Glenn Taylor from Perth. And I did an audition with Glenn and he's beautiful as well. And, um, at the end of the day, they said, we're going with Glenn. I said, oh no, but what about Sandy? I loved Sandy. And Christopher said, no, Pixie likes Glenn. I said, well, then it's Glenn.
23:06 Speaker 00 Skase may have burst into Channel 7 in style, but when you look past the gorgeous hair and Hermes ties, Jennifer Kite says he's actually pretty down to earth.
23:15 Speaker 06 Christopher was an inspiring leader, but humble. He was quite shy. He didn't have to go around and be the centre of attention, which surprised me because I expected him to be like a Kerry Packer or a Rupert Murdoch. But he wasn't. He was more low key, great manners and very measured.
23:42 Speaker 00 Channel 7 flourishes under Skyes. Home and Away starts. Skyes hires comedian Steve Weisard to do a late night David Letterman style chat show. And it's a hit. He buys back the rights to the AFL, the heartbeat of Melbourne, soon to be the heartbeat of the nation. And he wins seven the Olympic Games. Ratings and morale are going through the roof. And so is the spending. But nobody's asking exactly where all the cash is coming from. We now know he borrowed the money to buy seven at an interest rate of 13%. Oof. He's dreaming big on big credit and he keeps going.
24:24 Speaker 12 Christopher Skyes has realised his dream and literally spread himself around the country. Yesterday, he secured Channel 7 in Adelaide and seven in Perth. His company Quintex already owns stations in Mackay, Maryborough, Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide.
24:42 Speaker 00 When Skyes buys all these, he's actually breaking the law that limits how many TV stations one person can own. That law is there to make sure our media isn't all owned by a limited few. That was a nice idea, wasn't it? But Skyes has jumped the gun and shown more than a touch of the hubris that'll be his undoing. He thinks he can convince Bob Hawke's Labour government to change the law. He jets into Canberra, antagonises politicians of every stripe and, surprise, turns out they won't change the rules just for him. Skyes is made to sell his stations in Adelaide and Perth. This bending of the rules will end up becoming a bit of a pattern for Skyesy.
25:25 Speaker 00 While Christopher's working hard at building his empire, consistently pulling 80-hour weeks, once a year, he throws an epic quintex Christmas party. One year, it's a sunset cruise on the Yarra. It's a balmy Melbourne night, and barges with jugglers, magicians and singers float alongside them. Journalist Stephen Bartholomew is there for that one.
25:48 Speaker 05 Every table had bottles of the most expensive wines and whiskeys and you name it. Every guest was given a present from Hardy Brothers. Chris entered the reception centre with the spotlight and music blaring. It was way over the top. It was very much what Chris had become at that point.
26:07 Speaker 00 His other old journo mate, Robert Gottliebson, finds it all a bit unsettling.
26:13 Speaker 13 Suddenly, everybody who was there had to get up and praise Christopher. I never went to a Christmas party again because there's no way I wanted to go to a Christmas party and then have pressure put on me to praise the host. But that was telling you something had taken place. And Christopher is now playing on the big stage.
26:35 Speaker 00 Yep, Christopher's playing on the big stage. But the title of this podcast tells me he won't be up there forever.
26:47 Speaker 00 This season on Skyes' Fall of a Tycoon.
26:50 Speaker 10 I used to call Christopher God because he was very clever at motivating people to do things that he wanted done. If you did spend time with him, you would go home and mortgage the house and give it to him. He did create belief. Perhaps he was Australia's greatest ever salesman.
27:06 Speaker 00 Christopher's ambition and his spending knows no bounds.
27:12 Speaker 01 And greeted them at the airport were 27 white limousines and the champagne flowed.
27:17 Speaker 00 He's furiously building resorts across the Pacific, buying a football team, buying the most famous mullet, I mean footballer, in the country: Warwick Capper.
27:26 Speaker 01 He paid me the most cash because I was the best player. 1.9. Thank you. That's like 10 mil today.
27:32 Speaker 00 But does Christopher bite off more than he can chew? How the hell were we going to digest a billion-dollar acquisition? And as the empire starts to teeter...
27:40 Speaker 10 There was a gradual realisation that Skyes had done a runner-in, that he wasn't coming back.
27:50 Speaker 00 Skase: Fall of a Tycoon is an ABC Rewind production. Made on the lands of the Gadigal, Darug and Naluma people. It's produced by Kirsty Melville, Claudia Toranto, Jake Morecambe and Sarah Allerley. Sound design and original music by Emeris Cronin. Michelle Rayner is our editor. I'm Mark Humphreys.
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