Williams spent the bulk of his working life as a stockbroker, but in the last eight years of his career, he was at the centre of increasing federal regulation of the securities market, including the formation of the Australian Securities Commission , which later became ASIC.
After matriculating, he qualified as an accountant, and joined his father’s firm as a budding stockbroker in 1955. He may have had an impeccable family and work connection with the Melbourne business establishment, but Williams developed into a “big picture man”, according to several former colleagues.It was a time when Australia’s nascent national corporate regulation regime sorely needed people with a sense of the “big picture”. During the Williams-NCSC-ASC era, there were big deals, big corporate collapses, big tax evasion schemes, and a big sharemarket crash.
The year Charles Williams joined the NCSC – 1985 – was the same year corporate raider Robert Holmes à Court, pictured, was in the throes of his hostile bid for BHP.The new body did not have time to draw its regulatory breath. Industries like brewing and media changed hands and BHP became a takeover target. Figures such as John Spalvins, Robert Holmes à Court, Alan Bond, John Elliott and Christopher Skase splurged money on takeovers and ultimately fell off a financial cliff.
Globally, 1987 was also the year of the sharemarket crash, where stock values plunged by about 25 per cent, and whenTwo years later, Bond was forced to sell it back to Packer for less than a quarter of that amount. “The first is that BHP is conducting credit checks in respect of ”, and “that BHP has engaged private investigators to investigate .
Williams revisited the most dramatic period in Australian corporate history after his retirement in 1993. He said: “I have a keen awareness of the risk of speaking out of turn, having been threatened with legal action by BHP during the course of our hearing into the conduct of BHP and Elders in their struggle with Robert Holmes à Court.
“Thirdly, there was a belief that money could be concealed. In practical terms this was probably correct, and may still be right.Advertisement “The chain-letter business depends on making more and bigger bids, and if you’re chopped off at the bid at all, and you are not changing the fundamentals of the businesses you acquire, you’re in trouble.”
Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)
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