An amazing story of the Victorian Liberal Party and money

Pamela Williams in The Australian explains a very Melbourne dispute that influences who wins federal government.

Liberals’ war chest divides the powerbrokers:
The party’s biggest donor, the Liberal-aligned Cormack Foundation, is now in limbo, caught in a pending court battle that has shocked everyone and opened rifts behind the scenes among top Liberal officeholders.

Cormack as a company was founded on the profits of the $15m sale of the Liberal-aligned 3XY radio station in 1986. Since the late 1980s Cormack directors have given the party $60m — entirely from dividends, while preserving untouched capital now worth ­almost $70m.

In 2016, Cormack donated $1m to the federal Liberals for the ­election campaign, although Turnbull had met with members of the board and asked for $3m. Cormack directors apparently agreed to consider the request, but, unwilling to spend anything outside accrued dividends, sent the party only $1m.

At the same time, a wrestling match over the $70m was already under way between the Cormack board and Michael Kroger, the Victorian Liberal party president; Kroger took a stand that both the capital and the dividends of Cormack were wholly the property of the Victorian party. The Victorians were still riding out the impact of a massive $1.5m fraud by a former Liberal state director, and if there was Cormack money likely to be available (for the feds) then Kroger had been arguing it should be given to the Victorian branch.
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