Good morning,
It’s take-your-clients-out-for-drinks time for investment bankers across the globe. Macquarie Group boss Shemara Wikramanayake has just delivered a masterclass on how it should be done.
At Perth’s swanky COMO The Treasury restaurant last week, Wikramanayake, flanked by her army of top deal makers, held court over a dinner attended by the who’s-who of Australian mining.
Street Talk is told Andrew Forrest was in attendance and chimed in to ask what Macquarie was doing about his pet topic, green hydrogen. Also present was ex-Fortescue Metals chief executive, now exec director Elizabeth Gaines.
Other heavyweights in the room included Woodside Energy boss Meg O’Neill, Rio Tinto’s chief executive for iron ore, Simon Trott, and BHP’s president for Australia, Geraldine Slattery, who has just had MacCap sell two coal mines for $6.2 billion to Whitehaven Coal.
Then there was Tim Goyder, who has MacCap on the tools for a partner search at Chalice Mining, and ex-Northern Star boss Bill Beament, who is now seeking his fortune again at Develop Global. We are told those missing in action included Gina Rinehart, who probably had a clash given her neon bush doof, and MinRes’ Chris Ellison.
From MacCap’s side, global head of resources Russell Keating bounced between guests with whom he’s likely on a first-name basis by now, as did APAC head Tim Joyce. The bank’s WA head Abe Anand was there, presumably swapping notes with former WA chairman Mark Barnaba, who’s just taken the chairmanship at Macquarie-backed $10 billion IPO candidate AirTrunk. Mining banker Mark Dempsey flew in from Brisbane, while head of wealth management Sean West was in from Sydney.
Sources said Wikramanayake talked through Mac’s view of the world and then touched on a few areas where it sees opportunities across critical minerals and digitisation. The entire Perth office was invited, swelling the party to about 140 people. But things were pretty drama-free and most folks had driven back to their Cottesloe mansions by 11pm. We are told Macquarie should be doing it all over again a couple of times before Christmas, across Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, New York, London, Paris and even Milan.
Of course, it’s just an end-of-the-year banking ritual, but still, it shows Macquarie’s social capital with the C-suite of Australia’s biggest companies. It has a stronghold in mining deals but also plays for the other team, renewables, and often with its own money.
This year, it’s No. 3 in equity capital markets league tables and missing in M&A’s top 10 so far, but the guest list shows just how deep its company relationships run. Macquarie ended 2022 as the No. 3 investment bank, according to Dealogic.
On a side note, also in Perth last week Azure Capital pulled together its clients for pre-Christmas drinks. Key talking points were Adrian Arundell’s incipient move to Sydney and Olivia Boyne’s recent induction to the firm’s partnership ranks.
Happy reading, | 
