While you were out ...

You may have missed this:
â- Your name wasn't left at the door for Allan Moss's modest New Year's Eve knees-up in a Shangri La-De-Da suite to watch the crackers go off.
â- Nor was your name on the door at former Perpetual banana Charles Curran's Palm Beach shack for his post-Christmas shindig to compare notes on whether you'd dropped in on James or Lachlan out in the surf.
â- Your name was, however, on that bank letter explaining your mortgage repayments were going up thanks to the bank's exposure to dud mortgages. Luckily, Andrew Scott's impressive use of arrows and green boxes in turning $1 into $10 saw him pocket a $3 million payout from Centro to cover his own increased mortgage repayments.
â- Chris Corrigan joined the board of a Tasmanian fruit, veggie and walnut company, Webster.
As a big shareholder in the salmon farmer Tassal, all Webster needs is to import a few bottles of Darcy's Tuscan villa olive oil for a tasty summer salad.
â- Flight Centre's boss, Graham "Scroo" Turner, attacked Qantas for not paying commissions to travel agents on its fuel surcharge. "It's a blatant rip-off," said Scroo. Didn't Scroo's shareholders say something similar about his offer to buy back the company last year?
â- The AMP economist Shane Oliver made troubling claims that the shirt he wore to a concert by the former Beach Boy Brian Wilson was "even brighter" than the one he was spotted in a few years back. "I stocked up on bright shirts on a recent trip to Fiji in preparation. The guy sitting next to me complimented me on my floral shirt. Unfortunately, no dancing was allowed on upper levels of the State Theatre."
â- Twiggy Forrest became Australia's richest man for a day. Just months before his Fortescue Metals is due to ship its first million tonnes of iron ore he advertised for a head of rail operations.
We hoped they'd have thought of that sooner. Meanwhile, scientists discovered 330 million million million tonnes of iron ore on planet Mercury. At $US60 a tonne that's Twiggy's ticket to become the solar system's richest man. Who needs to dig up nails in the backyard? Or iron ore in the Pilbara?
Ex-Libs bomb outThe Liberal Party prides itself as being the modern-day champion of business.
It's just that when it comes to having a go at it itself, it's not quite among the champions.
Andrew Peacock, chairman of the Gold Coast property group MFS, is the latest in a growing line of former conservative pollies excelling in corporate life. It's just that the well-tanned Peacock is yet to face shareholders to explain the "very serious matter" facing the company.

We can only hope that Peacock can reflect more fondly as MFS tries to reduce its debt than he can on his investment in Child Care Investments Australia with another Liberal Party big banana, Michael Kroger.
Then there's the former Liberal health minister Dr Michael Wooldridge and his chums at Australian Pharmaceutical Industries who lost $17 million into thin air not long ago.
And who could forget John Hewson? The man who once told the nation he needed to know how many candles were on a birthday cake to calculate the cost.
The one-time prime ministerial aspirant is making a habit of exiting board rooms around the nation, with his latest departure from Pulse Health due to time constraints.
Odd, as his diary had recently freed up significantly after he quit the board of Natural Fuel, not to mention his departure as chairman of the Touring Car Entrants Group, the governing body of V8 Supercars.
It leaves us wondering what to make of the former world's bestest Treasurer, Peter Costello, flirting with the idea of becoming a MacGroupie.
Especially after once noting of Allan Moss's $33 million salary: "It's hard to think that anybody would be worth that kind of salary."
Still, Cossie's a trouper and more than willing to try and become that sort of person.
White-shoe wipe-outMichael King, the white-shoe wearing boss of the Gold Coast market darling MFS, has pooh-poohed any notion the company's plans for an abrupt name change had anything to do with its recent troubles.
While the company announced last week that it planned to no longer have its name clash with Boston's Massachusetts Financial Services, King said he had been thinking about a name change since last year.
We can only wonder if King's identity crisis was triggered when his Boston acronymical namesake popped up on his company's share register last year.
MFS welcomed Massachusetts Financial Services last October when they bought a $1.3 million stake.
Then, just days before the bottom fell out of the business last week, MFS said it had reached "a confidential agreement" with Massachusetts Financial Services "with regard to the ongoing use of the name and identity 'MFS' throughout the world".
MFS would "transfer and assign to Massachusetts Financial Services its Australian registered trademark MFS".
It's impressive timing. A little cash injection and sale of a brand name days before the brand became next to worthless and the company found itself in dire need of some moolah. Nice doing business with you.

We wonder what the yankee doodle dandies think about their investment being worth just 20 per cent of its original value.
Gnomes in avalancheIt has been a big few months for the broking banker UBS: the RAMS "float of the decade", subprime writedowns and selling huge slices of itself to foreign governments, to name but three.
So it was good to see the latter-day Singaporean-Middle Eastern-Swiss bank living up to its new acronym, Used to Be Smart, helping out Macquarie on the advisory work with the troubled MFS. In fact, UBS has 800 million reasons to help out: its loans to the shaky Southport mob.
Still, it's all in the timing - fancy picking a market meltdown for a $500 million capital raising?
The only surprise is that Merrill Lynch isn't helping too. The thundering herd impressed mightily with its increased stake in MFS as the company emerged from its trading halt last week.
Guns, gold, no goonsMeanwhile, the UBS gnome David De Pilla has secured his invite to the in-laws' next family function following his advisory work on the sale of Tenix.
The British mob BAE Systems bought Tenix Defence for $775 million in cash. De Pilla knows the Tenix business better than most: his wife, Victoria, is the granddaughter of Tenix's founder, Carlo Salteri.
That makes De Pilla the son-in-law of the chairman, Paul Salteri. But he may yet be sitting below the salt.
He hasn't yet secured a buyer for Tenix's infrastructure business. Sadly for the privateers Carlyle there's no joy as yet for Simon Moore's dream to tap dad's expertise in the area. His dad is the former Howard government defence minister, John Moore.