Where are they now?

The high-fliers from Allco Finance, Babcock & Brown, Centro Properties, Rubicon, ABC Learning, MFS and a host of other over-geared and over-structured finance players walked away with millions. And now, as the lawyers and liquidators pore over the smoking ruins of their corporate empires, most of these financial conjurers are back in the same business; some secretly bidding to buy back assets they once controlled ... on the cheap, of course.

Others moved on and are now consultants in a related field of finance - always finance.

While their collective activities left a hole in almost every superannuation account in Australia, the only winners - besides our superstar financiers - are the lawyers and liquidators hungrily picking over the remains.

In a three-part series beginning today, the Herald's business reporting team investigates what happened to the superstars of the boom.

David Coe

ALLCO FINANCE GROUP

David Coe may never scale the Everest-like heights of the corporate world again after the earth-shattering demise of his Allco Finance Group. But that doesn't mean that life hasn't been kind to him in the past couple of years.

While some of the trappings of his previous high-profile career have been lost or given up as a consequence - such as the chairmanship of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008 - Coe has been quietly beavering away on his other business interests, both old and new.

Now ensconced back in the exclusive Sydney suburb of Vaucluse after a spell in London, the 55-year-old has been helping to build up Sports and Entertainment, the sports management, retail licensing and marketing company of which he is chairman and owns 40 per cent.

Sports and Entertainment is the corporate face behind the V8 Supercars franchise, whose major event - the Bathurst 1000 - has been joined by the race around Sydney Olympic Park funded by the NSW government.

The company also represents sport identities such as Shane Warne, Matt Giteau, the Nine Network's cricket commentator, Mark Nicholas, and the doyen of TV interviewers, Sir Michael Parkinson.

But it is not all hard work for Coe. If he needs to get away from the CBD, where he was once a regular face, there's always the company-owned exclusive Mount Broughton golf course and country club at Sutton Forest in the Southern Highlands.

Unlike some of his former colleagues, Coe has kept a foot in the listed world by hanging on to his $80,000-a-year directorship of RHG, the former owner of RAMS Home Loans which collapsed spectacularly in 2007.

His old colleague and partner John Kinghorn, who continues as chairman of RHG, easily fought off a challenge by investors last year to have Coe thrown off the board, saying the former Allco chief executive had made "an invaluable contribution to the company over these extremely challenging times".

Meanwhile, Coe is believed to be dabbling in several of his old interests on an ad-hoc basis as a consultant to Minerva Capital Advisors, a boutique financial advisory firm founded by Allco's former head of funds management, Neil Brown, which operates out of Sydney, New York and London.

But a return to a more public role may have to wait until the various inquiries into Allco's failure by its receivers, liquidators and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission are completed - one of which involved Coe in a rare explanation in the NSW Supreme Court earlier this year of the events leading up to its collapse.

Phil Green

BABCOCK & BROWN

Friends say Phil Green has taken the collapse of Babcock & Brown hard. At its peak, the company dubbed Macquarie Bank's Mini-Me and its satellites boasted a market value of more than $10 billion. Like B&B itself, many investors were too leveraged and met an ugly fate during the global financial crisis.

But that hasn't stopped Green the laid-back asset trader from teaming up with former B&B mates and starting a mini version of the old company.

Green is a founding investor in and consultant to the boutique advisory mob Alceon, managed by his former B&B colleague Trevor Loewensohn, and operates out of small offices on Hunter Street in Sydney's CBD - just down the hill from the ritzy Chifley Square headquarters of the former B&B.

A small clutch of the old B&B group make up the nine-person team that scout about for distressed debt and other assets to buy on the cheap.

Alceon has as clients many of the high-net-worth investors who placed their money with B&B in the early days before it floated, rallied and thudded back to earth.

Last year it bought a portion of the $400 million residential mortgage book of GMAC as the old finance arm of General Motors pulled out of lending in Australia.

For less than $50 million Green picked up the residential mortgage-backed securities behind about 1000 non-conforming mortgages, taking everything below the AAA-rated portion of the book at a steep discount to its face value.

Alceon also picked over some of the carcass of the Allco group - in particular some little-known warehouse assets.

While the former B&B chairman Jim Babcock returned to San Francisco with some $100 million from the halcyon days, Green left with considerably less from share sales - about $30 million, associates say.

Green and Babcock now share an interest in the veterinary sector - through a stake

in a chain of pet doctor clinics which they were reportedly aiming to list through a sharemarket shell, effectively floating an entity that could be used to acquire other assets with scrip.

For B&B the game plan was always about leverage, achieving controlling stakes in assets and using other peoples money ... to make more money.

Andrew Scott

CENTRO PROPERTIES

In October 2007, Andrew Scott, the founder of Centro Properties, faced shareholders at the annual meeting in Melbourne to tell them how, if they embraced his co-cemented, co-investment model, they could turn $1 into $10.

It was an impressive chart with lots of arrows and boxes, but it left most of the audience, not to mention seasoned stockbroking analysts, baffled to say the least.

It did not faze the ever-confident Scott and his advisers - such as Andrew Pridham, who runs Moelis & Co, whose share price was trading at $9 - giving his global empire a market value of $10 billion.

Little did mum and dad investors or the wider investment market know that the sometimes abrasive Scott was fighting for his and Centro's survival behind the scenes.

Two months later, he lost the toss.

On December 17 that year, much to his clear annoyance when he held an analyst and press briefing, Scott had to tell investors that Centro was not in a position to meet its debt deadline, which was worth up to $7 billion across all its operations.

The share price plunged to just $1 and four weeks later Scott left the group that

he had started. But he did receive a $3 million payout.

The ensuing months of 2008 saw the US-based Glenn Rufrano, who ran the group's North American business, battle with Centro's bankers and angry shareholders who lost money daily when the share price hit 2?.

Billion-dollar class actions have been launched, Scott and some former directors are being investigated by ASIC, and the former finance director of Lend Lease, Robert Tsenin, is overseeing the break up of Centro.

Since his departure and a rest, Scott is said to be back working his overseas-based contacts as a consultant, under the moniker Andrew Scott Consultants.

He has touted himself around the chief executives and directors circuit, to no avail - a knockback that is said to have surprised the very confident Scott.

He has also been spotted recently having coffee in the foyer of 101 Collins Street, Melbourne, which is the home of top-tier lawyers and investment bankers. But no deals carrying his name have surfaced yet.

John Kinghorn

RAMS HOME LOANS

In terms of great escapes, the RAMS Home Loans founder timed his perfectly.

John Kinghorn pocketed $650 million from the sharemarket listing of his mortgage lending vehicle in July 2007.

Then, while shares in the lender barely had time to change hands, the bull market turned nasty. Kinghorn, the chairman of RAMS, watched the business he built up over 10 years implode in 10 weeks, causing spectacular losses for investors.

The speed of disaster caught the attention of The New York Times, which labelled the float as "maybe the worst initial public offering of the decade". Presumably that decade also took into account the dotcom boom.

The investment bank UBS, which took the float to the market, and the auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers, which signed off on the RAMS forecast of rising profit, should also be credited for their roles.

The problem with the RAMS model was that it borrowed cheap funds on short-term money markets to lend long - very long. So when the credit markets froze, RAMS simply ran out of funds after being unable to roll over its debt. The bulk of the business was quickly sold to Westpac at fire sale prices.

The rump of the RAMS mortgage book remained listed on the sharemarket and was placed in rundown mode. Kinghorn continues to head the business, called RHG, with his friend David Coe also on the board. Kinghorn was one of the founders and a key shareholder in Coe's Allco Finance Group.

And a funny thing has happened. As credit markets started thawing and lending competition fell away, RHG was able to substantially fatten its margins to the point where it is generating profits and with dividends on hold it has built up a cash stockpile of almost $400 million.

With the big four banks dominating the home-lending market, Kinghorn, with a private fortune estimated at $375 million, appears to be positioning himself for another assault on the nation's mortgage market. His 12 per cent stake in RHG is valued at more than $25 million.

While the 69-year-old is notoriously private, he

has been active across business.

Late last year he was one of several investors who backed the

$82 million acquisition of the national real estate group LJ Hooker, taking a 20 per cent stake.

In 2006 he established the charity arm The Kinghorn Foundation. Using funds from his RAMS windfall, the foundation has been involved in a micro-financing project in India, and it recently donated $25 million towards the construction of the Garvan Institute and St Vincent's Hospital's new cancer research centre in Sydney.

Elsewhere, Kinghorn has been involved in the energy sector, joining the board of the clean coal company White Energy after taking a $75 million stake in the group.

Laurie Emini

OPES PRIME

Before the global financial crisis hit, the Opes Prime boss, Laurie Emini, could often be spotted at one of Melbourne's finer and more expensive nightspots.

The largesse of the margin lender towards its biggest clients knew few bounds, and it made the Macedonian immigrant a popular figure in stockbroking circles.

Late nights and days at the races were often on the agenda. As a former client said: "You could often find Laurie somewhere in the vicinity of a fast car and a slow horse."

These days Emini is occasionally spotted in central Melbourne, but it's in the company of his lawyers. Otherwise he keeps a low profile at the family's home in Templestowe in the outer east.

Opes Prime collapsed in March 2008. At the time it had about 600 clients, who lost share portfolios worth about $1.6 billion.

Its financiers, ANZ and Merrill Lynch, seized the shares and later agreed to pay more than $224 million as part of a settlement with creditors.

In January Emini and two other directors, Anthony Blumberg and Julian Smith, headed to court, where they faced four criminal charges arising from their actions in the days before Opes Prime's collapse, including counts of being intentionally dishonest.

Each offence carries a maximum penalty of five years in jail.

Last month Emini was back in court, and was charged with 22 more counts of breaching his duties as a director of Opes Prime and Leveraged Capital, another company at which he was a director.

Emini, Blumberg and Smith had their

bail extended and have been ordered to attend committal proceedings listed for

February 28.

Lance Rosenberg and Rob Topfer

TRICOM

Lance Rosenberg's stockbroking outfit, Tricom Equities, caused a seizure in the Australian sharemarket over two days in January 2008, fuelling investor panic after a series of big market falls.

It emerged Tricom's failure to settle trades on both days was due to its involvement in the same securities lending business that later brought down Opes Prime, Chimaera and Lift Capital.

Tricom had established a securities lending book of $2.4 billion. But it had a white knight in Babcock & Brown, which saved it from the fate of its peers with $40 million. The money allowed Tricom to make good on stock loans that would have otherwise trapped investors' shares.

Despite a damning report from the Australian Securities Exchange and a $1.35 million fine - Tricom was found to have breached a key measurement of its financial health in

21 of 27 months - Tricom survived.

Rebadged as the StoneBridge Group and led by the former Babcock & Brown executive Rob Topfer, the business operates out of Governor Phillip Tower, offering broking

services to institutional, high-net-worth and retail clients.

Rosenberg, 47, has also survived, serving on the board of the StoneBridge holding company and working as an executive in the broking business. The Rose Bay denizen is enjoying a trip to the FIFA World Cup in his birthplace of South Africa.

The relative good fortune of the erstwhile Tricom compared with the demise of its rescuer, Babcock & Brown, remains one of the ironies of the global financial crisis.

The deep relationship between Tricom and Babcock & Brown is expected to be a subject of considerable interest in a public examination by liquidators next month.

Last year Babcock & Brown's liquidator, Deloitte, found the $40 million loan allowed the release of stocks that had been held as security to "various parties" associated with Babcock & Brown.

Gordon Fell

RUBICON

The former chairman of the Rubicon property empire has lost none of his dignity since the failure of Allco Finance Group, even though it has been at great cost to his reputation and standing.

Arguably the most impressive witness to have given evidence at the receiver's public examinations in March of former Allco directors and senior executives in the NSW Supreme Court, Fell was as polite and courteous as ever during his spell in the box.

But the impeccable show was one of the few public appearances in corporate life he has put in since the company's slide into administration in November 2008. Another was a creditors' meeting in July last year involving Rubicon Asset Management.

The controversy surrounding the related-party transaction that saw Allco acquire Rubicon in 2007 for $276 million (of which $63 million was shared by Fell, David Coe and a colleague, Matthew Cooper) continues to dog the Rhodes Scholar-turned-multimillionaire property investor.

Fell resigned as chairman of Opera Australia after eight years on its board and quit as a director of the charity The Smith Family. The former high-flying University of Sydney student also stepped aside as a trustee of his alma mater, Sydney Grammar School.

Nowadays, he dabbles quietly in the property industry, working partly for a small firm called White City and partly for himself, having set up a consulting company under his name in February last year.

That is based at his luxury $28 million home in Point Piper which he bought at the time of the Allco-Rubicon deal.

The property is also the registered address of five other well-established companies of which Fell is a shareholder and director, one of which he used to buy a

$6.5 million property in North Bondi midway through 2007.

He's also a shareholder of a small five-star beach resort in Vanuatu which he

co-owns with a long-time friend and stays at a couple of times a year, mainly during school holidays when he's not engaged in his other relaxing pastime of snow skiing.