WHO WOULD DEMONISE A BUSINESSMAN?

"LET'S GET SKASE"

Review by Luke Buckmaster
Rating (out of 5): 

Cast: Lachy Hulme, Alex Dimitriades, Craig McLachlan, Bill Kerr, Torquil Neilson, Nick Sheppard, Torquil Nelson, Adam Haddrick
Director: Matthew George
Producers: John Tatoulis, Colin South, Sue Taylor
Screenplay: Matthew George and Lachy Hulme
Cinematography: Justin Brickle
Music: Craig Bryant
Running time: 100 minutes
Australian distributor: Village Roadshow
Australian theatrical release: October 18, 2001
Viewed at: Village City Center, Melbourne

If an Australian film director were hired to create a local screwball version of Mission: Impossible, it might read a little like Let’s Get Skase, a light hearted bordering on immature project that fantasizes about nabbing the country’s most loathed fugitive.

That is, the country’s most loathed, and recently deceased, fugitive. When ambitious businessman Christopher Skase -- who once even owned MGM Studios -- fled Australia in 1995 after the financial ruin of his Quintex empire, he left a lot of his investors with no money, no chance of getting back, and only the figure of somebody to point the finger at. Billions of dollars went down the toilet.

His cowardly exodus from responsibility made Skase a lot of enemies in a short amount of time, and hatred of the man electrified when the pubic began seeing photographs and video footage of him lapping in it in a Moracco island mansion. Local television comic Andrew Denton cashed in on Skase’s shame by producing by a slew of condescending comments and acts and by staging a charity drive to raise money for a bounty hunter to nab him from his mansion and bring him back down under.

Like Denton, this film also cashes in on the deeply seeded sentimentality of wanting Skase and his fortunes back where they belong. That is primarily why this film may have been better received had it been released a few years ago, when the issue was more prominent in the public spotlight and before the master narrative of Skase’s life completed its final chapter in August 2001. At the least, given that the film’s real life villain is dead, the concept doesn’t seem as sharp, and already feels a touch outdated.

Who knows how Christopher Skase might have reacted to this quirky imagining of a revenge plot geared towards him, but one thing is for sure: he’s not going to be spending eternity losing sweat over the damage his death may have tolled on its box office earnings.

Whimsical and entirely improbable, Lets Get Skase has no intentions of adding any kind of serious perspective on the Skase legend, which is fair enough -- it’s a comedy. I’m sure however that director Matthew George didn’t intend his confrontation scenes with the Skase character to take on somber ramifications: the fact that his characters are beating up a representation of a recently deceased man so close to his death sits a little awkwardly. This movie didn’t want to have anything to do with that, its intentions are more simplistic and quite obvious: it is there for fun, energy, and a few laughs.

It works OK, although it seems very much like a first time effort, which it isn’t. To his credit, George keeps the action and energy of his picture rollicking along at a good rate for its duration. He may however come in a little too early initiating his quirky pitch; after an opening newsreel that bears similarities to the masterful beginning of Citizen Kane, he finds little time for character development before throwing his viewers into a crowded room full of Quintex investors and introducing his lead character, Peter Dellasandro (Lachy Hulme).

Dellasdandro convinces the entire room, con-man monologue style, to trust him to form a team to kidnap Skase and bring him back home. Of course the crowd finds it entirely reasonable to entrust a charismatic stranger with the job, and Dellasandro forms a team of amateurs -- you know the drill: the electrician, the brain, the driver, etc. Alex Dimitriades is one of them, and forms an on screen buddy relationship with Lachy Humle (who also co-wrote the movie) which carries the film into its final acts.

The inevitable confrontation with Skase (Wayne Hassel) and his wife Pixie (Dianne West) has its moments, and is powered by a reality breaking lunacy of a comic book caper or an Austin Powers movie, mixed in with a bit of Mission:Impossible and a ballroom dance scene reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s tango with Jamie Lee Curtis in James Cameron’s True Lies. It’s all quite light hearted, so it’s not meant to be taken seriously, and although the scriptwriters keep the momentum running they don’t invent a scenario clever enough to warrant the character’s extended mission to find their target. Once they are inside Skase’s mansion, these characters don’t do much more than locate a safe and give Christopher a few smashes on the head.

If Andrew Denton were to re-release his old clips of Skase gags at this point in history, the gesture would be seen as inappropriate, sour, and disrespectful to the dead. This movie mostly avoids condemning itself with bad taste, but it’s giddy carefree and anything-goes approach can’t reward its viewers for their participation in the now defunct fantasy of getting Skase and his ill-fated fortunes returned.

"DEMON" SKASE 

Christopher Skase was a consummate product of the market. His rise from a middle class background in Melbourne to ownership of one of Australia’s TV networks would not have been possible without the backing of mainstream banks and other financial institutions. The list of his main unpaid creditors reflects that fact: State Bank of Victoria (Tricontinental Corporation) $74 million; Nippon Shinpan $37 million; Wardley Australia $11 million; State Bank of NSW $11 million; ANZ Bank $1 million. (It is their money that the Howard government is seeking to recover.)

In early 1989, just before his empire disintegrated, Skase bid $1.2 billion for the MGM-United Artists studio in Hollywood, placing him on the verge of international fame. He was out-manoeuvred by someone with a bigger line of credit—Rupert Murdoch—and the deal fell apart, signalling the beginning of the end for Qintex.

Skase was actually something of a small fry—although a brash, upstart one—compared to the heavyweights of Australian business who crashed in the late 1980s and 1990s, most leaving far greater debts behind. To scroll through their names is to list many of the most prominent figures of the corporate establishment.

Alan Bond, once owner of Australia’s premier TV network, now lives in a $3 million London penthouse. He is back in business after serving just three years in jail for stripping $1.2 billion from Bell Resources in the late 1980s, leaving debts of $662 million. Abe Goldberg, Australia’s biggest bankrupt, found refuge in Poland after his Lintner textile group collapsed owing $1.5 billion. He fled Australia in 1990 with personal debts of $790 million. George Herscu is also living in exile after his property and retail business Hooker Corporation went into liquidation in 1989 with debts of nearly $1.7 billion.

Bruce Judge retired to the south of France after his Ariadne Australia was wiped out in the 1987 sharemarket crash, leaving debts of $1.3 billion. John Spalvins resides on an Australian holiday island following the mid-1990s disintegration of his $2 billion Adelaide Steamship group, one of the country’s largest industrial and retail combines, with debts of $470 million. John Elliott remains a Melbourne businessman, but has fallen far from his days as chairman of Elders-IXL, a $1.6 billion brewing, commodities and financial conglomerate that fell in the early 1990s.

Skase’s methods were far from unique. Like others, he exploited the depressed state of the stockmarket in the mid-1970s, when inflation kept share prices down in the wake of the 1973-74 world recession. As long as share and other asset values rose, borrowers could repay their loans by selling acquired businesses at higher prices. Skase and other takeover merchants thrived, using small amounts of capital to gain control of vast assets.

Most initially survived the October 1987 share crash because American and other central banks flooded liquidity into global markets to artificially boost growth. But the cracks began to appear within two years, as interest rates reached 18 percent in Australia and property prices fell.

Until the mid-1980s, Skase had expanded his operations more slowly and conservatively than his rivals but he became highly-leveraged as he sought to catch up to them. Toward the end, he attempted to bolster his situation by skimming extra funds from acquired companies as management fees. This was regarded as perfectly legitimate—until Skase began to default on loan payments. As an article in the Melbourne Age this week acknowledged, his operations were “aggressive, but orthodox for the times”.

Even the notorious flamboyance of Skase and his wife—they threw extravagant parties and indulged in various publicity stunts—was driven by the need to be seen to have the financial means to match his older peers. “Skase was merely ‘keeping up with the Joneses of the 1980s’,” one commentator observed. “Alan Bond had won the America’s Cup and American banks were lending him billions as a reward. He was buying anything he could get his hands on. Robert Holmes a Court was making bids for BHP, and John Spalvins was acquiring David Jones and Tooth’s Brewery and later countless others.”

So unexceptional were Skase’s methods that he may not have been convicted on any of the 60 charges eventually laid against him by the National Companies and Securities Commission. One financial columnist noted: “He was alleged to have improperly authorised payments from the Qintex public companies to a management company he controlled, but the amounts involved would not have even paid the interest on the $1 billion that Alan Bond and his cohorts hijacked from Bell Resources.”

It seems that when Skase skipped the country—with his passport restored to him by a trusting liquidator—he simply decided not to take the risk of prosecution. Instead, he secretly shipped assets to Spain, where he retained all the comforts of life to which he had become accustomed.

Columnists and editorial writers have argued that there was a silver lining in the Skase cloud, because corporate regulators drew lessons from his conduct and parliaments tightened the company legislation. But one such editorial, in the Australian Financial Review, concluded on a more sombre note. “A decade after the Qintex collapse, Australian is indeed facing another round of spectacular corporate calamities.”

Recent months have seen the largest company crash in Australian history—the $4 billion collapse of HIH Insurance—the liquidation of the One.Tel telecommunications network, which was substantially owned by the country’s biggest media moguls, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, and a spate of other failures, including the Harris Scarfe retail group.

Once again, after another period of inflated share prices, the operations of the market are creating disasters, wreaking havoc on the lives of retrenched workers, little investors and small business operators. Contrary to the claims of authorities and media pundits, little of substance has changed in terms of corporate regulation, while the pressure on companies to produce higher profit margins has increased.

A column in the Financial Review admitted: “While Skase’s domination of today’s headlines may be put in a box as a relic of a past era, the fact is that some of the same mistakes are being made and probably will continue to be made.”

While he was still alive, Christopher Skase became a scapegoat for the corporate failures of the 1980s and 1990s. Now, even in death, he is still being demonised, in order to deflect attention from the underlying, recurring breakdowns of the private profit system.

Click HERE to read this on:  World Socialist Web Site

WHY DIDN'T THEY WANT CHRISTOPHER SKASE TO OWN THE MGM FILM STUDIO - OR A TV NETWORK - OR A PUBLISHING EMPIRE?

WELL - THE DEAD "DEMON" TYCOON CHRISTOPHER SKASE

NEVER DID WHAT HIS RIVAL, THE "HERO" TYCOON

RUPERT MURDOCH, DOES ...

... EXCUSE WARS

"SECURING OUR WORLD" = "EXCUSING A WAR"

It's been wryly observed elsewhere that the editors of Rupert Murdoch's 125,456 mastheads around the world instinctively knew they should support the recent war against Iraq, even though such an edict was never issued by the billionaire American businessman.
It's why someone at The Courier-Mail in Brisbane just knew the war pages for days on end had to be labelled "War on Terror", left over from the Afghanistan front, rather than the far-more-accurate "Bombing the Shit Out of Poorly Trained Young Conscripts Armed Only With World War II Weapons from a Great Height".
It was for that reason, too, that Courier readers were bombarded with feature story after feature story of Saddam eating babies for breakfast and his more evil son Uday raping young virgins for lunch and dinner.
In a family newspaper like this, we won't even mention what the other son Biday got up to after dark.
And once hostilities began, Coalition of the Willing forces were discovering almost daily a new grave of torture victims or another portable factory for producing chemical or biological WMDs.
Many of these startling claims have proven false with time, just like the reasons given to invade in the first place - Saddam getting uranium from Niger; Saddam with the capacity to launch WMDs in 45 minutes, Saddam with WMDs in the first place.
So with George WMD Bush, Tony Blair and our very own Johnny Howard facing growing and disturbing claims that they fabricated the reasons for sending their young citizens off to war, what sort of heading do you think some loyal sub-editor at the Courier came up with for a page on Saturday July 12 devoted to the growing scandal of false reports and dishonest reasons for war?
"Dossier of Deceit" or "Iraq: The Cover-up"? "War scandal grows"? Something flippant like "The Three Amigos"?
No, none of that. The jingoistic and totally inaccurate "Securing Our World".

Click HERE to read more articles like the above ...

WHY DID THEY RUIN SKASE - THEN DEMONISE HIM?

DID CHRISTOPHER SKASE HIT A RAW NERVE -  SOMEWHERE?

DID CHRISTOPHER SKASE "KNOW TOO MUCH" - ABOUT SOMEONE?

Fugitive Australian businessman Christopher Skase feared Australian authorities would try to frame him with some of Australia's most famous and baffling murders if he returned to Australia to answer white collar crime charges.
That's just one of the shock revelations to come from the latest tapes of phone conversations by the failed entrepreneur's wife, Pixie Skase.

The Bug has obtained exclusive access to several key tapes believed to have been recorded via an intercept device attached to the phone lines of the Skase mansion on the Spanish island of Majorca.

In the tapes, the still stunning, vivacious blonde, obviously still very much in love with the disgraced business tycoon, shows her hatred of the Australian media who she claims are hounding them both to an early grave.
She talks bitterly about the attempts to frame her husband on "blue collar crimes because those silly corporate charges simply won't stick".

The Skases liviedin Spain after they fled Australia in 1991 after the collapse of their business empire, leaving behind debts of millions of dollars.

Clearly the pressure on both Skases took its toll on the pair - some of the tapes were recorded late at night when she was making random calls from their rented mansion after drinking heavily...

Click HERE if you want to read the rest of this spoof ... It ridicules and exposes the motives behind the demonising of Christopher Skase ...,

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