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FuturePlus CIO is crowing about new office Artie Beetson. Arguably the greatest prop in rugby league’s post-war history. The first Aboriginal to captain Australia in any sport. State of Origin hero. Bringer of The Biff. And most importantly for our purposes here, glue in the marriage of Michael Block, the chief investment officer of FuturePlus. Back to Big Artie in a moment.
As you can see from these pictures of Michael’s office at FuturePlus, the man is cock-a-hoop for the club that most associate with Beetson, the Eastern Suburbs Roosters. If a nook or cranny of his Margaret Street digs are not stuffed with one piece of Easts memorabilia or another, they are stuffed with family photos, although many of the family members are depicted in Roosters clobber and/or posing with Roosters greats.
Among the prize items in Michael’s collection are the original supporter’s kit he got as a kid back in the ‘60s, a 1970s pokie coin cup from Easts Leagues (adorned with the old red-bird-in-ablue- shield logo that Michael prefers), and autographs from just about every Easts immortal you’d care to name, Jack Gibson to Brad Fittler. There’s even some gear with an industry connection. Doug Bickerton (brother of Bruce Bickerton, Lazard Asset Management’s relationship manager) is a painter with a penchant for chickens and eggs, and a couple of his rooster originals have found their way on to Block’s walls.
So why does Michael have all of this priceless memorabilia at work? His wife, a big Parramatta Eels fan, can’t stand it being at home. “At least we’ve got Artie Beetson,” Block reminds himself, referring to big Artie’s stint in the blue-and-yellow toward the end of his career. Colleagues at FuturePlus have taken to calling their CIO’s office ‘The Coop’, but Block says the way the Roosters are playing this season, it should probably be renamed “The Mausoleum”. Mayor of Chicago tries the Aussies again A delegation from Melbourne’s Centre For Investor Education were wondering to what they owed the honour when Richard Daley, the Mayor of Chicago, addressed them on their recent visit Stateside.
But investors in Macquarie Infrastructure Group would not have been surprised. The boss of America’s third-largest city would have been salivating at the chance for some face time with Aussie fiduciaries, given at the height of the credit boom he’d leased the Chicago Skyway to Macquarie partner Cintra) for a cool US$1.83 billion. That meant Macquarie also needed to control the Indiana Toll Road, the major source of traffic for the Skyway, so with Cintra they signed a 75-year lease on that blacktop for a whopping US$3.8 billion. As if that weren’t enough, in bargaining with Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels the Big Mac was mandated to make US$400 million of improvements, such as installing electronic tolling.
