Cash bouquet of $200m for Queensland corporate market - He's got it in the bank
James McCullough
29 March 2006
The Courier-Mail

BRISBANE-born merchant banker John Wylie has returned home waving a large cheque book with up to $200 million to spend.

John, the son of well-known local company director Rod Wylie, is poised to open a Queensland office of his runaway merchant bank Carnegie Wylie & Co, a company formed only six years ago and a group on the lookout for some serious investments.

After recently forming an alliance with Sun Super, Carnegie Wylie & Co is about to launch a corporate opportunities fund with a new Brisbane office keen to capitalise on the growing Queensland corporate market.

"We think there are great growth opportunities up here," Wylie, an Oxford Rhodes Scholar and career merchant banker, said yesterday.

"The economic growth rate of this state is going to drive a lot of companies' growth and we are seeking smaller to medium sized companies that will grow into billion-dollar companies."

Fellow merchant banker and one-time Queensland University bunker buddy Robert Gregg is charged with heading the new Brisbane office and his brief is reasonably broad.

"In the corporate advisory and direct investment area there are very few local teams and very few that can do big projects," Mr Gregg, who started his career with Schroders and spent several years in Asia and Melbourne, said.

The merchant bank is looking for direct equity investment opportunities of between $20 million and $75 million with the ability to easily fund deals of around $200 million.

"We are looking at all sorts of opportunities and certainly Queensland punches above its weight, economically," Mr Wylie said.

"We decided to open here because we think there is a very strong growth market here and we take a view that there are tremendous opportunities in Queensland."

Carnegie Wylie was formed in 2000 from a staff of just four -- Mr Wylie, the former Australian investment banking head of CSFB, and Mark Carnegie, a career investor and corporate adviser in New York, London and Sydney, along with two PAs.

The group has now grown to a staff of more than 50 throughout the country and had a hand in many of the corporate world's larger financial deals.

Carnegie Wylie is advising Telstra on the forthcoming T3 sale and is advising Toll Holdings on its controversial bid for Chris Corrigan's Patrick Corporation. At the same time the group advised Coles Myer on the recent sale of its department stores and recently completed a report to the Federal Government on the potential carve-up of Medibank Private.

The merchant bank has also taken significant equity stakes in its relatively short shelf life, acquiring a 6 per cent stake in local coal seam methane proponent CH4 and acquiring a near 30 per cent stake in Indonesian television network Surya Citra Televisi.

Carnegie Wylie also holds 20 per cent of the Lonely Planet group, and has a hand in helping Robert Champion de Crespigny stage a comeback with plans to create a new Australian copper mine through Buka Minerals.

John Wylie, Ron Walker and de Crespigny just happened to snap up over 30 per cent of Buka at the end of 2003.