John Kinghorn,80,who made his fortune as the founder of Rams Home Loans,is the patriarch of the family trust whose $100,000 donation to the independent Warringah MP’s campaign has been found by the Australian Electoral Commission not to have been correctly disclosed.
Mr Kinghorn’s colourful business career began in accountancy,before he founded Allco Finance Group in 1970 and spotted an opportunity in the non-bank home loans space. He started Rams Home Loans in 1991 and debuted on the BRW Rich List nine years later. He lived in a Mosman home that overlooked the harbour,skied in North America annually and exercised each morning on Balmoral beach.
When Krispy Kreme doughnuts arrived in Australia,in 2003 he was part of a consortium that bought a third of the Australian company,followed by its global parent.
Loading
In 2007,he floated Rams,retaining a 20 per cent stake and pocketing $650 million.
“Making money is fun,” he told theAustralian Financial Review at the time. And his timing proved impeccable when three weeks later the US subprime mortgage crisis wiped three quarters off the value of the shares.The New York Times described it as “the worst initial public offering of the decade”.
In 2012,Mr Kinghorn was caught up in a corruption inquiry through his shareholding in the mining venture Cascade Coal,which was alleged to have given NSW Labor backbencher Eddie Obeid a 25 per cent stake in the company in exchange for intelligence that would help it to win a coal exploration licence in the Bylong Valley.
Mr Kinghorn was a shareholder in Cascade Coal,as well as a director of the public company White Energy,along with Travers Duncan,Brian Flannery,John McGuigan and John Atkinson. The Independent Commission Against Corruption heard that Mr Kinghorn also held shares in Cascade Coal on trust for Greg Jones,a friend of the disgraced former Labor minister Ian Macdonald.