Fund manager James Mawhinney made quite the splash when he arrived in the small north Queensland town of Mission Beach a few weeks ago.
The boss of the controversial investment empire Mayfair 101 brought with him pop singer Ricki-Lee Coulter, independent MP Bob Katter – and a pledge to spend $135m buying properties in town.
Mawhinney was in town on 25 October to throw a party celebrating Mayfair’s purchase of nearby Dunk Island, a cyclone-ravaged resort that he says his group will restore to its former glory.
In between posing in front of white letters on the beach spelling DUNK ISLAND, about 250 Instagram influencers and locals sipped Moet while a saxophonist wailed away, social media posts show.
“I had a wonderful time over the weekend discovering the beautiful #DunkIsland”, Coulter later gushed.
The meet and greet was just one part of a promotional push for Mayfair’s investment empire that has also included a mammoth press advertising campaign.
On top of the ad blitz – which includes a full page ad in Brisbane tabloid the Courier-Mail as recently as last Tuesday and another full page in the Australian Financial Review last week – Mayfair is taking the show on the road, visiting all capital cities in a fortnight for what it is billing as “the must-see investment event of 2019”.
The group has plenty to spruik.
On top of Dunk, there’s a basket of investments in technology and cryptocurrency companies, some of which are hard to trace, and another abandoned island, Santo Spirito, in the Venetian lagoon – an area gripped by a state of emergency due to heavy flooding this week.
But it is Mawhinney’s promise to buy more than 230 properties in Mission Beach that has the local community buzzing – and Mayfair on the hunt for yet more millions from investors.
Documents obtained by the Guardian show that to put its foot on a portfolio taking in houses, vacant lots and even a shop near local attraction the Big Cassowary, Mayfair has so far paid deposits totalling $7.4m to Mission Beach property owners.
The documents show the options are held through a series of property trusts that are ultimately controlled by a company called Sunseeker Holdings.
This company, which Mayfair spokeswoman Joanne Painter said was part of the broader Mayfair group, boasts as directors Mawhinney and Brigette Panetta, who according to a LinkedIn profile is Mayfair’s finance director.
If Instagram posts depicting Panetta and Mawhinney together – including one where he is wearing a costume jewellery gold chain emblazoned with the letters BOSS – are accurate, she also appears to be his partner in life.
There is no suggestion the Sunseeker structure provides Mawhinney or Panetta with any personal benefit.
Meanwhile, Mayfair hopes that property prices in Mission Beach will rise once Dunk Island is up and running, potentially delivering a healthy profit.
To complete the string of property purchases, Mayfair has pledged to pay a total of $135m at various times between this month and September next year.
As it looks for cash, Mayfair has been circulating an information memorandum among Australian real estate investors.
In it, Mayfair claims to have raised about $170m so far over its two years in existence, and says it aims to raise another $250m by the end of next year.
The document also shows how much money Mayfair will have to spend each month to settle on the properties in Mission Beach it has committed to buy.
It shows that almost $18.3m is due to property owners this month , rising to a peak of almost $42.5m in March next year.
On top of that, there’s the $31.5m Mayfair says it has spent on Dunk itself.
Painter said the purchase of Dunk Island settled on 30 September, but how much cash changed hands is unclear as the seller, a company associated with former Linc Energy boss Peter Bond, holds a mortgage over the island.
“The Group’s investment in the region will be funded through a combination of Mayfair 101 resources, and third-party capital including funds from family offices, high-net-worth investors and other strategic financiers,” she said.
“We are well advanced in finalising the funding resources required to complete settlements.”
If Mayfair can bring it off it would be “huge” for the local community, Pete Faulkner, an economist who is also president of the Mission Beach Community Association, said.
“At the initial stages when that was first announced there was a good deal of, I would say, healthy scepticism around,” he told the Guardian.
“That has subsequently decreased … the longer it goes the more people are becoming aware that things do appear to be happening.”
He said the area has had a rough trot for 15 years after being hit by Cyclone Larry in 2006 and then, just as it was beginning to recover, suffering Cyclone Yasi in 2011.
“We’re in a better place now than we have been but we’d be in a better place still if Dunk reopened,” he said.
Hopes of a tourism-driven economic revival for the area now depend on whether Mayfair can muster the financial firepower to seal the many deals to which it has committed.
The Cassowary Coast regional council seems to be on board; on Thursday it gave Mayfair “in principle” rights to develop the Dunk Island spit, a triangle of land between two beaches controlled by local government.
“They’re certainly talking the talk and as far as we can see at the moment they’re walking the walk to the degree that some of the properties that they had contracts on have already settled, some of them are yet to settle,” Faulkner said.
“So it’s going to be a process. Nobody is expecting this to happen overnight and anybody who is is probably kidding themselves.
“If they think that Dunk is going to be up and running by Christmas then clearly that isn’t going to happen.”
