When Frank Lowy fell from a podium and landed on his head at the A-League soccer final in Melbourne last month the 30,000-strong crowd fell silent fearing he was badly hurt.
But the 84-year-old entrepreneur and Football Federation of Australia chairman quickly got to his feet, swept the grass from his hair and resumed his trophy presentation, to rounds of applause.
The spectacular tumble followed by swift recovery is typical of the life-long toughness displayed by the shopping-centre mogul, who built Australia’s Westfield Group into an international property company after narrowly surviving the Nazi occupation of Hungary during the second world war.
“Life has its ups and downs but you can only look forward,” says Mr Lowy over lunch in his office next to Sydney Tower, the tourism attraction emblazoned with his company’s logo.
In the coming months, Mr Lowy has a bulging in-tray to address. After the controversial spin-off of the Australian and New Zealand operations of Westfield Group into a separate company called Scentre , a decision on where to domicile and list the international arm — dubbed Westfield Corporation and led by Mr Lowy’s sons Steven and Peter as joint CEOs — remains to be settled. The US seems the likely destination.
On top of that is a growing brouhaha over the FFA’s unsuccessful campaign for Australia to host the football World Cup in 2022. Mr Lowy, who led the bid, has been forced to deny a bribe was paid to Jack Warner, the former head of Concacaf, football’s governing body in North and Central America.
The Lowy family, which owns 9.5 per cent of Westfield and 4.2 per cent of Scentre, must also deliver on an $11.8bn development pipeline that includes opening a flagship mall at New York’s World Trade Center this year and new shopping centres in London and Milan.
Mr Lowy founded Westfield in 1960 with his late business partner John Saunders, a fellow Jewish immigrant to Australia after the holocaust. They changed how Australians shopped by introducing US-style malls to Sydney suburbs in the 1960s. In the late 1970s they exported the Westfield model overseas and built a network of 40 malls, mostly in the US and UK.
Slight in stature and with a mop of white hair, Mr Lowy has had a good year, adding A$700m to his A$7.8bn personal fortune, according to Australia’s BRW, and watching his beloved “Socceroos” — the national men’s soccer team — winning the Asian Cup for the first time.
But bitter memories of a shareholder revolt a year ago over the demerger of Westfield and Scentre still rankle. “I never felt so unjustly criticised as I felt then. I was wondering whether there was some underlying motive here to punish me or bring me down,” he says.
The family said demerger would enable the international group to access funds and expand faster. But a small group of pension funds objected that it would raise the company’s debt and risk profile. The Lowy family initially failed to persuade the required 75 per cent of shareholders in Westfield Retail Trust — a separately listed company connected to Westfield Group — to back the deal, forcing a dramatic suspension of a company meeting.
Some critics say that Mr Lowy, for once, did not lead from the front with a strong personal operation.
A lobbying campaign ensued and the meeting was resumed three weeks later where the proposal narrowly passed.
“When the going got tough I got involved,” says Mr Lowy, claiming that the demerger has created A$12bn in additional shareholder value already. Analysts say a falling Australian dollar, booming property markets and recovering US and UK economies have provided beneficial tailwinds.
Supporters say Mr Lowy’s victory demonstrates his midas touch for dealmaking, while opponents claim it displays a win at all costs mentality.
Just over a decade ago Westfield agreed to pay A$3.5m to settle a claim that it backed a bogus community action group to thwart a rival in Sydney following court-approved mediation.
In 2008 a US Senate committee report alleged the Lowy family had used US corporations and banks in Liechtenstein to hide assets. Mr Lowy denied he had done anything wrong.
This followed a separate A$25m tax settlement between Mr Lowy and the Australian tax authorities in 1994. “The American political establishment, particularly in the Senate, wanted to bring attention to tax deficiencies and we got caught in their net,” says Mr Lowy. He describes the Senate inquiry and report as a “political witch hunt” and says the family did nothing wrong.
Mr Lowy is one of Australia’s biggest philanthropists, giving A$300m to causes in Australia, Israel and elsewhere. He founded the Lowy Institute, a foreign policy think-tank based in Sydney. “I wanted to bring the world closer to Australia and get Australia out to the world,” he says.
Born in what is now Slovakia, Mr Lowy and his family moved toHungary in the second world war. In 1944 his father was killed in the Auschwitz-Birkenhau death camp. The young Mr Lowy hid in a small flat with upto 40 other people. “The loss of my father was the most traumatic event in my life — I can’t forget the pain,” he says.
Mr Lowy, who describes himself as a Zionist, fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, later joining his mother and other family members in Sydney. Jill Margo, author of a biography, Frank Lowy: Pushing the Limits , says the terrible experiences of the second world war instilled a deep sense of the importance of family and of determination. “The extremes of the holocaust did not melt Frank. They forged him into steel,” she says.
He encouraged his three sons to join the business. Peter and Steven run Westfield, while David manages the family’s private investments. “It was never nepotism, always based on merit,” says Mr Lowy.
Critics, such as the Australian Shareholder Association, have complained about the high salaries paid to the Lowy family directors of Westfield. But investors continue to back the family’s stewardship. “They pay themselves at the top of the market but the family have been good stewards of capital,” says Tony Sherlock, analyst at Morningstar.
Mr Lowy attributes his success to a strong work ethic and boldness mixed with conservatism. “I don’t remember all my successes but I do remember failures,” he says.
His passion for soccer, meanwhile, was inherited from his father, who used to take him along to games. In 2003 Mr Lowy was elected as chairman of the FFA, since when the A-league was set up and Australia joined the Asian Football Confederation and a football-mad region with fast-growing economies and an easier path to World Cup qualification.
Australia’s failure to secure the 2022 World Cup ranks among his biggest disappointments. “I still get upset and have nightmares about it,” he says. The government backed an A$46m campaign to secure the tournament but its bid attracted one vote from Fifa delegates, who controversially backed Qatar.
Australia has been drawn into the investigations into corruption at Fifa through a A$500,000 payment that allegedly ended up in the personal bank account of Mr Warner. Mr Lowy describes any suggestion of irregularities with the Australian bid as “plain ridiculous”.
He is due to stand down as FFA chairman this year. So is he also ready to call time on his role at Westfield Corporation and Scentre, which he also chairs? “I don’t know how long my tenure is,” he responds. “I am 84 years old and have not retired because I feel I have something to contribute.”
Culled from FT
