Talk's cheap, but advice costs top dollar
MALCOLM MAIDEN
13 October 2006
The Age

UBIQUITY is the gift that keeps on giving in the advisory business, as Carnegie, Wylie & Company is demonstrating this year. John Wylie and Mark Carnegie's boutique firm teamed with Citigroup to get Toll Group's torrid eight-month, $6.1 billion takeover of Patrick Corp across the line in May, and it is continuing to score.

It was a Telstra adviser for T3, converted its strategic advisory brief with Coles Myer into the nation's biggest defence job - when Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and a bus load of buy-out funds turned up in August with a $17.2 billion bid for the retailer - and worked on BlueScope Steel's move in August to gatecrash the Smorgon Steel-OneSteel merger by buying 19.9 per cent of Smorgon on-market for $320 million. It did the strategic review that will probably see Medibank floated for $2 billion next year, and has emerged as the adviser on Suncorp-Metway's $8 billion tilt at Promina, again with Citigroup.

Corporates can use the share and debt-creation and distribution factories that Citi and other global investment banks team with advisory outfits, but the trend is to take a second opinion.

Promina has, for example, plumped for two integrated advisers, Goldman Sachs JBWere and Macquarie Bank. A trend within a trend is to select an integrated bank and a boutique, as Suncorp has done.

One of the upshots is that it's a strong market for advisory talent. Wylie and colleagues Peter Hay, Jeremy Mead and Andrew Leyden are handling the load, but the firm is hiring in Sydney and Melbourne.