Free Twiggy by Andrew Burrell

attracting headlines in 2007 when he was implicated in a major share scandal at one of his London-based oil companies.
    Forrest’s next hiring at Jacksons wouldbe Simon Lill, his old schoolmate and fellow prefect from Hale School. Lill, a talented athlete with a smart business brain, would become a key ingredient of Jacksons’ success. Like many, he got carried away with the deal-making excitement of the era. After leaving Jacksons, Lill was investigated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and ultimately sent to prison for eighteenmonths on two counts of improperly using his position as a director. When he emerged from jail in 1997, Forrest gave him a plum job at his new venture, Anaconda Nickel.
    Strangely, it seems there was never a fifth member of the Jacksons Five. For some time, Forrest even struggled to hire a fourth broker for his new enterprise. Jeff Braysich had been working at Patersons, one of Perth’s mostconservative and successful firms, having started in the industry in 1983, and was regarded as one of its best talents. When Forrest called him, Braysich rejected the job offer out of hand. But Braysich remembers Forrest repeatedly phoning him until he finally relented: “I wasn’t sure whether to go, but he does wear you down. By the ninth phone call, I was saying, ‘Okay, for fuck’s sake, I’ll come!’When I told Patersons I was joining Jacksons with Andrew Forrest, they were horrified.” Braysich would later have his own brush with the law: he was sentenced to a twelve-month suspended jail term after being convicted of twenty-five counts of market rigging, involving shares in a Perth mining company in the 1990s, but after a long legal battle the conviction was eventually quashed by the HighCourt.
    The Perth stockbroking establishment had never seen anything quite like Andrew Forrest and his crew at Jacksons. Forrest and Braysich were both just twenty-four; Rigoll and Lill were a year younger. But pretty soon, Perth’s entrepreneurs were lining up to do business with these young turks, who traded feverishly in mining and energy stocks and would underwrite new floats worth millionsof dollars. Every new resources explorer with dreams of making it big would come in to see Forrest. On several occasions, Jacksons hit the jackpot when a mining stock priced at 20 cents opened at $2 immediately upon listing. It was champagne all round on those days.
    On the rowdy trading floor of the old Perth stock exchange on St Georges Terrace, the Jacksons boys were known as aggressiveand cavalier. Regulation of stockbroking in the 1980s was weak; this was an era of few checks and balances. Insider trading was rife and, unlike today, there were no “Chinese walls” – the barriers within a firm that separate the research analysts, who provide advice to clients, from the traders, who do the buying and selling. John Poynton recalls many of the older brokers along St Georges Terracefrowning upon Jacksons. Jeff Braysich agrees: “We weren’t exactly loved around Perth. If we were invited to functions, they weren’t clamouring to associate themselves with us. It was because of the nature of the deals we were doing and the publicity we were generating.”
    Besides Bond and Connell, Jacksons’ key clients in Perth included Robert Holmes à Court (the legendary corporate raiderwho tried to take over BHP), Yosse Goldberg (a key player in the WA Inc. scandal whose company, Western Continental, sank in 1987 before he fled to Spain) and Mark Povey (the youthful Rolls-Royce-driving tycoon who was bankrupted when his petrol empire fell over). Forrest also established strong links with colourful Melbourne mining tycoon Joseph Gutnick and Sydney insurance king Larry Adler and hisson Rodney (another of his good friends who would later be sent to jail). It was the most spectacular bull market anyone in the industry had seen, and the biggest names in Australian business lined up to trade the mining stocks being