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Valad's fall shatters Barry Wynne's retirement plansFont Size: Decrease Increase Print Page: Print Bridget Carter | February 19, 2009

Article from: The Australian

THE man who co-founded Valad Property Group says his retirement plans have been dashed by the collapse in the share price of the company he helped to build.

Barry Wynne, 72, spoke to The Australian this week about his disappointment in seeing what was once a profitable company grow too quickly and teeter on the brink of failure.

Mr Wynne, now retired, has several million shares in the company, which have fallen from almost $2 a year ago to just over3c.

"It has changed my retirement plans substantially," he said.

Mr Wynne planned to embark on a low-cost housing project and a commercial venture. However, the value of his securities has fallen from about $150 million to little more than $100,000.

"Nobody would expect the meltdown to happen so quickly," he said.

Mr Wynne said Valad went from having two offices to 30, from 100 staff to 400, and from operating in one country to 17.

"Put to one side the global financial crisis, they tried to get too big too quickly," he said.

"My experience with Lend Lease is to be very careful about big steps."

A former architect, Mr Wynne moved into senior management at Lend Lease, where he worked for more than 25 years, before leaving to carry out residential development in Sydney's northwest. That was with Valad's Stephen Day, who had also spent much of his career with Lend Lease.

"We moved a bit more into industrial and formed Valad," he said. "Shortly after we formed Valad, Peter Hurley joined us from Lend Lease and a number of other ex-Lend Lease people were with us.

"It gradually grew and we had more investors coming through and larger projects in the industrial side and that led to us going public in 2007."

Mr Wynne, who was chairman of the company, said the listing was a success and the company started to gradually expand.

After differences of opinion with the board, he stood down in 2004, but continued as a director for a further two years.

Mr Wynne said he thought the likely outcome for the trust would be that Scarborough's Kevin McCabe would take the company over. Mr McCabe sold Scarborough to Valad for nearly $2billion at the height of the property cycle in June 2007. He secured a board seat and a 3 per cent stake in the company.

But after the British property downturn, Valad had to make a final payment for the Scarborough takeover. The payment was reduced by about $11 million to $67 million and Mr McCabe has been given a stake in the company of almost 20 per cent in exchange for cash.

Mr Wynne said the company's problems boiled down to "no grey hairs on the boards".

"The only grey hair is McCabe. It is a classic case of the Bond-Packer deal with Channel Nine," he said, referring to Kerry Packer's buying back the network from Alan Bond for a quarter of a billion dollars, having sold it to him for about $1billion