The problem with being bullied at school, there's nowhere to sit quietly. You tend to move from one taunting corner to another. Your young life is all about fighting and losing a war on multiple fronts, and perhaps finding too much comfort in cakes. Backed into a corner for too long, such a kid will nurse dreams of vengeance – and some eventually come out swinging.
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So it was with Solomon Lew, the unhappy, picked-on chubby kid whose father died when he was 12. According to people who have been close to and burnt by Solly the sun god, Mr Lew's engagement in endless conflict, hunger for revenge and delight in "holding up the metaphorical finger", as The Sydney Morning Herald colourfully wrote last month, is simply the story of a man replaying his unhappy childhood – except Lew, all grown up, is almost always the winner.
"I even wonder if he'd have been so driven to succeed if he hadn't had such a hard time as a kid . . . he's turned around and showed everyone," says a former business associate and friend of long standing. "He loves to stick it up people. It's not even that much about the money. He loves to fight people and win."
Retailer and fellow campaigner against online GST exemptions, Gerry Harvey, has known Solomon Lew for 10 years. He said the business world was well populated with people whose struggles at school serve as a motivation to make it big as adults. "I fall into that category a bit. I didn't have a rough childhood, but I thought I was a bit better than other people. You have dreams when you are a kid and when those dreams aren't coming true you don't give up. It steels you up a bit. You keep going a bit more."
Mr Harvey agrees that money isn't the motivating factor in Solomon Lew's corporate battles. "We're a bit the same that way. It's about winning. It's about achievement. And if you have a few setbacks, it makes you more determined to right the wrong."
Of late, Mr Lew has been determined to settle old scores. For weeks his face has beamed from the business pages as part of the running – or rather stalled – story of the twin takeovers of David Jones and Country Road by South African retailers Woolworths.
The loss of David Jones to an overseas entity should have been the big story and 10 years ago it might have been. The embodiment of middle-class Australian gentility – those vaguely snooty ladies in black – sold off to the yarpies! Where was the outrage?
It was all about Lew. In short, he held the $2.2 billion David Jones deal hostage by slyly acquiring a 9.9 per cent stake last month. This wasn't enough to block the deal, but there were hints that Lew may have secretly rented a large block of shares, and the attendant voting rights, a strategy he employed during his bitter fight to stay on the Coles Myer board 12 years ago.
The ransom for allowing the DJs deal to proceed was a premium $17 a share for Lew's 11.8 per cent stake in Country Road. Lew had paid about $2 a share, a takeover bid foiled by Woolworths in 1998.
The two parties have been in a death grip stand-off ever since, punctuated with grenades thrown by Lew's lobbyist Michael Kroger at Country Road annual meetings.
Seventeen nasty years later, the David Jones takeover by Woolworths was made conditional on Woolworths acquiring 100 per cent of Country Road.
ln what amounts to corporate double-speak, Woolworths insists no direct deal was made with Lew. But hey presto, Country Road's share price more than tripled since January, Lew abstained from voting on the David Jones takeover two weeks ago, and on Friday he accepted the $17 offer for his Country Road stake. He was tootling along the Italian coast in his yacht at the time, $421 million richer.
Another old foe had its nose rubbed in the dirt during the David Jones stand-off – the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. From 1995 to 2000, the corporate regulator spent millions failing to unravel the notorious and complex Yannon transaction to which Lew was either a party or a patsy. The transaction involved transfer of $18 million in losses from Lew's private interests to Coles Myer, of whose board Lew was then chairman. While Lew paid back $12 million to Coles in a civil action, ASIC's push to bring criminal charges in the matter weren't taken up by the Department of Public Prosecutions.
Now, with the David Jones takeover, ASIC was raising another red flag, claiming Lew was obtaining a "collateral benefit", a payoff not available to other shareholders, and therefore prohibited, and petitioned the Federal Court to have the matter independently evaluated.
The DJs takeover was structured as a scheme of arrangement, which requires support from 50 per cent of shareholders and 75 per cent of shares voted, unlike a conventional takeover that needs acceptance from 90 per cent of shareholders. A scheme of arrangement also requires approval by the Federal Court. ASIC claimed the deal struck by Lew and Woolworths – a deal the parties have never admitted to – undermined the integrity of such schemes as a way of undermining the takeover safeguards.
Ten days ago, Federal Court judge Kathleen Farrell noted ASIC's concerns, saying she had considered granting the independent evaluation. But because no David Jones shareholders were unhappy with the outcome – in fact many had voiced displeasure at ASIC's interference – and because Lew had abstained from voting, the judge gave the takeover the green light.
Observers of the deal weren't so relaxed. As one commentator noted: "If Solomon Lew can legally drive a truck through the substantial shareholder provisions, good luck to him, but it doesn't reflect well on our supposedly informed market."
Business media consistently reported the takeover deal as a hostage negotiation driven by bad blood. Dean Paatsch, a partner in governance advisory service Ownership Matters, was critical of the suggestion that Lew had more shares under his control than were being disclosed.
"The only reason people do things in the dark is because it's to their advantage . . . and market integrity is at risk here," says Mr Paatsch, who is at pains to make clear that Lew, from a legal standpoint, has done nothing wrong.
"He's just a good poker player. He has faked them out by way of transparency, but that's a problem with the law, not a problem with him. He has been incredibly agile within the fault lines of the existing law . . . he was under no obligation to declare his hand, and he didn't."
Paatsch notes that nobody knows if Lew had a blocking stake or not. "The amount he declared that was in his purview was insufficient to block the takeover."
If Solomon Lew has exacted his revenge on Woolworths using smoke and mirrors, how sweeter it must be. According to former associates, illusion takes pride of place in Solomon Lew's toolbox.
"An utter illusionist. If I knew how he operated, I'd have told him to get stuffed," says Andrew Landeryou, blogger and business consultant.
Masters of high-end vengeance tend to drive their enemies to the poorhouse or the madhouse.
On the face of it, Solomon Lew, during a six-year slugfest, sent Andrew Landeryou to both places.
In 2000, Lew invested $4 million in Landeryou's IQ Corporation, a sports statistics and online gaming company that went the sad way of many dotcom start-ups. Lew wanted in after Landeryou secured investors from overseas. Landeryou's father, Bill, an ALP powerbroker and one-time Victorian minister, warned Andrew not to go into business with Lew but Lew, says Landeryou, had threatened an injunction if he wasn't allowed to invest.
Six years later, after a series of madcap events that were a mix of Catch Me If You Can and a Charlie Chaplin tear-jerker, Landeryou was made bankrupt and Lew took possession of the $3 million Parkville mansion owned by Landeryou's wife, former Melbourne city councillor Kimberley Kitching, IQ's registered company secretary.
In the aftermath, there were two people journalists were advised never to write about: Lew, because he'd litigate you to death, and Landeryou, because he'd pulverise your good name or otherwise in his Vexnews blog, a sometimes funny, sometimes news-breaking, often-times vomitous forum of, well, vexation.
"I found it very difficult to be angry at Sol after I had written about him. Maybe it was a purging experience," says Landeryou now.
Landeryou believes that Lew taking his home had nothing to do with money. "I think he was a bit embarrassed about it and wanted to blame someone other than himself. He didn't want to be the loser."
Lew is ordinarily very patient in seeking revenge. The Country Road saga is testimony to that. But sometimes it doesn't work. In February 2012, Lew's super yacht Maridome bumped the equally super yacht of a rich American, Wendy McCaw, in a Florida shipyard, causing damage estimated at $US500,000.
When McCaw tried to strike an amicable settlement, Lew characteristically attempted to drag the matter out. In April, the Florida Middle District Court ordered Lew's boat impounded. Two weeks later Maridome was released after $US620,000 was lodged with the court. In that particular poker game, Mr Lew had run out of cards.