CATALANO STUNT SO SHORT OF MARK IT WAS STUNNING

SORRY Anthony, but you are not the 2018 version of the 1980s corporate raider and master manipulator Robert Holmes a Court. Not even close.

If Holmes a Court had pulled a stunt like the one you tried on Fairfax Media on Sunday night, it would have been an elegant combination of real financial substance, loaded with menace, and actually committing him to nothing.

Yours had absolutely zero of the first two and far too much of the last. Indeed, to call it an inept and rather embarrassing joke would be to give it more credibility than it deserved.

Fairfax chairman Nick Falloon would have done better to have completely ignored your letter; but in this litigatious era, he took the smart – and still easy – course of having the whole board promptly and appropriately dismiss it.

Then, it was on to the meeting and a clear majority of both voting shareholders (81.5 per cent) and voted shares (88.6 per cent) in favour of the merger with – actually and importantly, the takeover by – the Nine Network.

It will now go on to be approved by the Federal Court next week, absent some loon prepared to put a billion or two of real money on the table – and prepared to see much if not most of it head straight down the Fairfax drain.

For one, Young Warwick Fairfax is no longer ‘available’ to be the loon.

For two, the ‘entrepreneurial’ ANZ Bank is also, in its way, no longer ‘available’ to lend the money to any 2018 version.

This decade’s ANZ CEO is going to be in the witness box at the Royal Commission this week, not on the phone making crazy loans to wannabes. into bed with Nine.

The only sliver of credibility he had to back up his 1 per cent holding was the 2 per cent held by investor Alex Waislitz. But neither of them – nor anyone else – was putting real dollars on the table upfront.

Catalano included some gratuitous advice that the Fairfax board had to pursue “the highest possible offer from NEC (Nine) or any other potential suitor”.

Just quietly, hasn’t he noticed that is precisely what the Fairfax board has been doing, whether actively or by default. The entire universe of possible buyers could have come knocking on Falloon’s door any time in the last six months, with cash to beat Nine‘s paper.

They didn’t. The only parts of Fairfax anyone would be interested in are its controlling stake in Domain and its half-share of Stan. Both of those are looking somewhat less alluring than previously – especially Domain, as the Melbourne-Sydney property market goes into a period of extended ‘correction’, very different to the glory days when Catalano was riding high.

And those commentators who would suggest there’d be buyers with deep pockets for the Age and the SMH are, like former treasurer Paul Keating, living in 1987.

I’ve said the merger was always misconceived. But as a takeover of Fairfax, it was the best that Fairfax holders were ever going to do, swapping out of Fairfax paper for – slightly less challenged – Nine paper.

Of course, Catalano – and anybody else – could still wade into the market for Fairfax shares over the next week or so; that’s, if they wanted a position in the new Nine-Fairfax group.