FIRB chief David Irvine and former ASIO boss Dennis Richardson have insisted that the Australian Government's scrutiny of Chinese investment in Australian assets is strong, robust and naturally "the best in the world".
However, these best in the world processes do not apply to acquisitions by Australian private equity firms, even when the firms investors are primarily foreign. Albert Tse's Wattle Hill, which led the takeover of Capilano Honey, is a good example.
As stated on its website:
Wattle Hill RHC established its Australian fund in March 2016 with two of the largest insurance groups from China and Europe, as well as family-office investors from China’s leading private e-commerce and FMCG companies. Wattle Hill RHC’s Investment Committee includes one of Australia’s most respected investors, Ashok Jacob of Ellerston Capital, and Sean Huang of Riverhead Capital, the private equity arm of Sunshine Insurance Group, one of China’s largest privately-owned insurance groups with over 35 million direct policy holders.
The Australian profile of Tse and Wattle Hill says:
Tse is building up his own private equity firm, Wattle Hill Capital, with the backing of several wealthy Chinese families. This has involved buying a stake in ASX-listed infant formula company Bubs and a takeover last year of the Capilano Honey company. Wattle Hill’s advisers include Kerry Packer’s former right-hand man Ashok Jacob and former NSW premier Nick Greiner; co-investors in the deal include Kerry Stokes’ family — ties that date back to Albert’s days working with Macquarie Bank in Beijing.
The Capilano Honey takeover was not subject to FIRB scrutiny, that is the law. However, scrutiny of takeovers of Australian assets by foreign funded private equity firms has happened before. The case of the House of Reps Select Committee on Print Media (4/11/91), better known as the parliamentary inquiry into the Packer-Conrad Black Tourang Consortium takeover of Fairfax is a good example.
Public sentiment today demands that acquisitions such as that of Capilano Honey by Albert Tse's Wattle Hill be subject to the same type of scrutiny.
TO BE READ WITH
Power players
How Kevin Rudd’s daughter and her Hong Kong-born husband built a business empire on Chinese connections.
By
GLENDA KORPORAAL
Jessica Rudd and Albert Tse in Shanghai. Picture: Daniele Mattioli
From The Weekend Australian Magazine
February 22, 2019
12 MINUTE READ
69
In his book Not for the Faint-hearted, Kevin Rudd recalls the moment he stood on stage, a freshly minted prime minister after the 2007 landslide election, his family by his side, and how one “factional operative from the right” said later that evening: “We need to fix the Asian problem with the first family.” Asked about this now, his daughter Jessica laughs. “Do they mean my husband or my children?”
All these years later there’s still interest in this power marriage between Jessica, the only daughter of the former PM, and Albert Tse, the Hong Kong-born son of a Malaysian Chinese businessman. “In China, people who don’t know my background ask how I, a Chinese guy, could get the prime minister’s daughter,” Tse says. “They had never seen a Chinese guy become a son-in-law to a first family in a modern Western democracy. I tell them when I first met her, Kevin was not prime minister. I always joke about it. I tell them I didn’t get her, she got me.”
The pair first met in Brisbane as a result of their mutual concern at the rise of Pauline Hanson’s anti-Asian One Nation party. It was the year 2000; Tse was 21, studying at university, and Rudd was 16, still at high school. She had formed a group protesting against Hansonism, while Tse joined the Labor Party and did volunteer work for his local Labor MP, Kevin Rudd. “It was scary times,” he recalls. “You had a party which was not very fond of people who looked like me which almost had the balance of power in a one-house parliament in Queensland. That’s when I became active in politics and joined the Labor Party.”
Tse, who taught himself English after arriving in Brisbane with his family in 1988 at the age of 10, was surprised to find his local member had an interest in China. “Kevin could speak Mandarin, which was quite cool,” he says. “I could only speak Cantonese at the time.”
Through their volunteer electorate work, Jessica and Albert kept bumping into each and their relationship grew. In May 2007, when Jessica was 23, they married at an Anglican church in Brisbane on an unusually hot day with television cameras outside as Opposition leader Rudd walked his daughter down the aisle.
Former PM Kevin Rudd, wife Therese Rein, daughter Jessica, granddaughter Josephine and son-in-law Albert Tse at the ALP campaign launch in Brisbane, 2013. Picture: AP /Tertius Pickard
Fast forward to 2019 and Rudd and Tse are the parents of two young children, now based back in Brisbane after stints in London and Beijing and five months in Shanghai last year, a global life with growing business interests between Australia and China. Brought together by a shared anger at the state of politics, they have abandoned any thoughts of direct political involvement, working instead to raise their family and build what has the potential to be a significant business combining online shopping with investing using their unique mix of Australia-China connections.
Jessica is an Australian ambassador for Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, selling Australian products into China through an online shop called Jessica’s Suitcase. A merger in train between the Jessica’s Suitcase group (now folded into ASX-listed eCargo) and the Chinese arm of Australian wholesaler Metcash will allow the business to expand from online sales of Australian products into China to bricks and mortar stores across the country with the combined backing of Jessica and Albert’s connections as well as the sourcing power of Metcash.
Albert Tse, Capilano CEO Ben McKee and Roc managing partner Mike Lukin at the Capilano Honey headquarters in Brisbane. Picture: Glenn Hunt
At the same time, Tse is building up his own private equity firm, Wattle Hill Capital, with the backing of several wealthy Chinese families. This has involved buying a stake in ASX-listed infant formula company Bubs and a takeover last year of the Capilano Honey company. Wattle Hill’s advisers include Kerry Packer’s former right-hand man Ashok Jacob and former NSW premier Nick Greiner; co-investors in the deal include Kerry Stokes’ family — ties that date back to Albert’s days working with Macquarie Bank in Beijing.
While the Australia-China political relationship has been strained in recent years, the Tse/Rudds have forged a thriving business developing their own connections among China’s young newly rich as well as some older hands. For those who care to look, the couple have many common strands in their family backgrounds. Both have parents with a strong entrepreneurial drive. Jessica’s mother Thérèse Rein founded a government contracting business, Ingeus, helping the long-term unemployed find work, expanding from Australia to the UK and Asia, while Tse’s father Bob founded a Hong Kong packaging business that was the basis for a business visa that allowed his family to move to Australia. Both families have lived in Hong Kong and the mainland and share a common love of Brisbane as a place to bring up children.
Tse is happy for his wife to have the spotlight, although his business interests are beginning to attract attention in Australian business circles. And they have made an impressive list of contacts among China’s newly wealthy. “If you’re not in the Tse family Sino/Australian Rolodexes, it’s pretty likely that you are dead or, even worse, irrelevant,” says Sydney businesswoman Gabrielle Trainor, an adviser to Wattle Hill who has known the couple for more than a decade since being introduced by a mutual friend just after Rudd became PM. “Albert switches smoothly and easily from the traditional Chinese approach to seniority to the more informal Australian business style,” she says.
I meet Tse in the coffee shop of The Opposite House, a funky upmarket hotel in Beijing’s Sanlitun designer shopping district. It has a popular bar where Tse recalls the Rudd family and the Turnbull family meeting in happier times some years ago for a drink to celebrate the engagement of Malcolm Turnbull’s son Alex to Hong Kong-born Yvonne Wang, whose family has high-level connections in China. “I went shopping with Kevin, to buy them an engagement present,” Tse recalls. Asked what he thinks of the Turnbulls these days, Tse’s anger is palpable. He thinks about making a comment, barely restrains himself, and says through tight lips: “Ask Jessica.” The Rudd family has never forgiven Turnbull for not supporting Kevin Rudd’s bid for secretary general of the United Nations.
It was Kevin’s rapidly rising political career that prompted them to leave Australia and set out on a global career path. “We made a decision that win, lose or draw with the [2007] election, we needed to get out of there,” Jessica says. “I was thinking about working in communications. But if I had stayed there everything would have been through the prism of what my father was doing. It was not how we wanted to start our married life together.”
In early 2008 they signed a lease on a flat in London’s Notting Hill. Jessica started working in crisis communications for Hill and Knowlton while Albert eventually worked with Macquarie Bank specialising in infrastructure financing, making the big shift to higher-end investment banking. But the couple’s enthusiasm for living in London faded as the global financial crisis hit. Albert was offered a job in Macquarie’s Beijing office so the couple moved to the Chinese capital in 2009. While the economies in the West were suffering from the GFC, China’s was taking off.
Despite his Chinese heritage, it was not an easy start for Albert in Beijing. When they arrived, Jessica had more Mandarin than he did, from her school studies in Brisbane. “Chinese people would congratulate me for being able to say ‘Ni hao’ while they would look critically at Albert even if he delivered a complicated sentence in Mandarin,” Jessica recalls. “It was difficult,” Albert agrees. “I had a few months of part-time lessons. But I just had to dive in. We were working on a lot of big deals involving state-owned enterprises. There is not a lot of English spoken in the SOEs. When you have clients that don’t speak English, you learn Mandarin quite quickly.”
One of the biggest deals he worked on was the listing of the Agricultural Bank of China on the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges in 2010. It was the world’s biggest ever initial public offering, raising more than $US22 billion. The job gave him a box seat for meeting a new generation of Chinese business people as well as influential foreigners looking to invest in China. The fact that he was married to the daughter of the Australian prime minister didn’t hurt, either. The deal gave Albert a connection with the Stokes family, which invested in the Chinese bank IPO, and allowed him to meet Chinese entrepreneurs making their fortune in online businesses, such as Alibaba founder Jack Ma. Albert’s contact list began to grow. He was often invited to dinners by Chinese friends who were entertaining high-powered people passing through the capital. “Beijing is such a happening place. I would get these phone calls in the afternoon saying, ‘Hey. We have a dinner on tonight. Do you mind coming?’”
With Albert working in investment banking and studying Mandarin, Jessica found herself at home with a lot of time on her hands. On the urging of her mother she decided to write a novel, turning to her friend from their London days, author Kathy Lette, for advice. “She said, ‘If you want to write a novel you have to write what you know’,” she says. “I knew politics and I knew about being laid off from investment banking. It was around me every day. So I came up with something that was political chick lit.” From a Japanese wine bar in Beijing, Rudd wrote her first novel, Campaign Ruby, about a young British woman who is laid off from investment banking in London, comes to Australia and gets involved in a political campaign.
Jessica Rudd with her parents at the launch of her first book in 2010. Picture: Lyndon Mecheilsen
The book was already at the printers but its release was rushed when she heard the news that her father was being ousted from his job by former deputy Julia Gillard. “It came out immediately after the coup. The 24th of June 2010. We had to fast-track it.” Some commentators described its observations of the dog-eat-dog world of Australian politics as “a little too uncanny”.
She followed up with a second book, Ruby Blues, in October 2011, while she was pregnant with their first child. Josie was born in May 2012, and having a baby in China changed their lives. When they flew back home they would stock up on baby goods they couldn’t get in China. “We would arrive back from Australia overloaded with baby oil, nappy rash cream…” Soon her friends with young children wanted to try them. “My friends in Beijing who were mums would come over and nick my stuff,” she says. After bringing back more goods from Australia for themselves and their friends they realised there was a demand in China for Australian products.
Jessica had witnessed the rise of online shopping in China first hand as couriers would appear regularly in their apartment building, dropping off so many goods that the doormen would get angry. A work friend of Albert’s put them in contact with Alibaba, the rising star in China’s e-commerce world. At Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou, south of Shanghai, Jessica was introduced to Maggie Zhou, one of Alibaba’s first employees, who had a strong interest in Australia. “They very kindly walked me around,” Jessica recalls. “I was flabbergasted at the vastness of it and how sophisticated it was. There was a two-storey screen with live data projected onto it. It was a map of the world showing parcels being flung around like ping pong balls. I was just so blown away by it. I thought, whatever happens next, I want to be part of it.”
So Jessica became a retailer, establishing an online store selling goods on Alibaba’s TMall global platform. She set up the business with a friend, Chantelle Ye, an investment banker and fellow new mum. They called the store Jessica’s Suitcase, after all those suitcase runs bringing Australian goods to friends in China.
After their second child, McLean, was born in December 2015, the couple decided to move back to Brisbane. The pull of home was strong and they were worried about the impact of pollution on the health of their young children. The day she landed, Jessica began visiting small companies making products she thought would sell well to young buyers back in Beijing. “I kept knocking on doors saying, ‘Hello, skin care manufacturer, I am opening up a store on Alibaba’s TMall Global’. “They would say, ‘What? You mean Chinese people want to buy stuff from Australia?’”
The number of brands on Jessica’s Suitcase has steadily increased, and now includes everything from paw paw ointment to face creams, toy bears made of Australian sheepskin to Penfolds wine. Jessica’s search for goods led to Bubs, an infant formula business based on goat’s milk, set up by an Australian woman, Kristy Carr, who had lived in Hong Kong with young children.
Around 2015, on the suggestion of a major Chinese fund manager, Albert decided to go out on his own and set up a private equity fund investing in Australian products that Chinese people and others overseas would be interested in buying. “I decided to invest in Bubs as I thought it was a really good company with really good management. We helped to fix some of their issues with the China market and in January 2017 we were able to list the business.” Wattle Hill was formed, the name taken from the apartment building where they first lived in Brisbane. The Bubs investment was followed by the Capilano Honey takeover last year. The investments have one thing in common — the potential to take them to the China market.
Jessica Rudd and Albert Tse in Shanghai. Picture: Daniele Mattioli
Jessica says she doesn’t plan her life but she is confident her own newly merged business now has the critical mass to take off. On a five-month stint in Shanghai last year she decided to update herself on China’s changing retail market. “Neither of us has worked in retail or has branding experience but we know this place [China] and we can spot its trends,” she says.
Former NSW premier Nick Greiner, an adviser to Wattle Hill, met Albert when they were both incoming independent directors on the board of Jemena, an electricity, gas and pipeline utility company owned by State Grid and Singapore Power. He met Jessica later socially. “In many ways they are a 21st century renaissance couple who effortlessly bridge Australian and Chinese culture, society and business,” Greiner says. “They are able not just to network but also to do business with large and small counterparts in both countries.”
Jessica rejects suggestions it’s difficult for Australians to do business in China. “People in Australia get über-excited about taking a tiny piece of the US market, but they think China is just all too daunting. Isn’t Trump’s America more daunting than this place?” Nevertheless she says people need to be prepared for many twists and turns in the rapidly changing Chinese market — hence the couple’s decision to spend an extended time in Shanghai last year.
Jessica says the family may decide to move overseas again but they will always have a base in Australia. “That is the upbringing we were both lucky enough to have. It is idyllic, we are glad to be able to give it to our children, but we don’t feel like that means we are people of one place. We can be anywhere and we can still return.”
GLENDA KORPORAAL
ASSOCIATE EDITOR (BUSINESS)
Glenda Korporaal has been covering business and finance in Australia and around the world for more than thirty years. She has worked in Sydney, Canberra, Washington, New York, London, Hong Kong and Singapore an...
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