Broken Hill (Brazil) Pty Ltd
Investment Plans in Perth

His parents separated and divorced when he was 8 years used and, for a concise period while his mother worked in the country to try to urge herself and his three younger sisters, he was placed in an orphanage operated by the Methodist Church in Victoria Park, and then later into the concern of the Salvation Army at their children's home in Ned lands. Shortly before his 10th birthday, the family were reunited and moved to a little rental home in Scarborough. This labor was physically demanding but the pay was excellent. At the equivalent time he started evening school and day release classes at the Perth Technical College studying automotive and aeronautical engineering as healthy as correspondence home studies which he continued into his premature 20s. The Group controlled a major network of sales and service outlets and branches throughout the then Federated States of Malaya. It was during this period that he learned and honed his now renowned management skills and business acumen. Mr Willie was also a gifted and very prosperous racing driver and it was his fearlessness and considerable wins after the wheel of his own designed and built racing car, the strong wellie SPECIAL, that eventually resulted in him being sponsored by the Singapore STRAITS TIMES newspaper group to represent Singapore at the 1958 Macao Grand pix. At that time there was numerous press speculation in Cong Kong that HUTCHISON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED (HI), then one of the three largest public companies in Cong Kong, was close to bankruptcy and would soon fail. It was widely obvious that the Cong Cong AND SHANGHAI BANKING CORPORATION were closely monitoring the situation as HI's principal bankers and were worried about their exposure. Mr Willie was specifically interested in acquiring two quoted companies which were then associates of HI, A.S. What he hoped to do was buy these two companies, if they were available, and absorb them into the CHINA ENGINEERS GROUP. If successful, his intention was to merge CHINA ENGINEERS' and carpers’ substantial property holdings into HUTCHISON PROPERTIES, and the ahoy CANNING CORPORATION'S food and beverage riches into A.S. Watson, which was already a major distributor of pharmaceuticals, wines and spirits. Growth which had substantially outstripped management's ability to regulate the company and its many associates and subsidiaries. Happily for HI's shareholders at that time, the Cong Cong BANK offered to urge the company by subscribing for 150 million new shares of HK1 each at par and, as a condition of this offer, the Bank further undertook to provide the excess banking facilities needed to enable the group to trade its way out of its difficulties. During that address, he traced the history of the group and explained what he thought was mistaken with the company and why it had failed. Mr Willie noted that accounting and financial controls throughout the group were so weak that the best HI's head office were qualified to attain by way of reporting was a quarterly estimate of the profits or losses of their various companies. Some of which only reported annually and that it was this lack of financial discipline, which had led to many of the problems the group was then facing. The beginning half of 1976 therefore was a particularly trying time for the group as the rehearsed reorganization also included a comprehensive programmed for streamlining HI's corporate structure and achieving control over group cash flow. A number of BR's bankers had expressed care about the ability of the UK management to deal with the problems they were facing and two of them had threatened to appoint a receiver. BR's principal business was then the manufacturing of record players, electronics and home appliances. Unfortunately, this meant that it was necessary to liquidate a number of the outdated and antiquated industrial and manufacturing companies and, in consequence, to lay off more than 2,00 people in the UK and the United States. Mr Willie took the opportunity to realism profits on a substantial percentage of his investment in the company and to start to wind down his involvement in the day today management of the group. In the latter weeks Mr Willie and his team from USIA SECURITIES LIMITED spent long hours with the company's auditors, Ernst whinny, as healthy as ASL's legal advisers and senior executives of the Cong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in order to thrive a comprehensive rescue plan. By the end of 1997 when Mr Willie retired from the Board of REGAL HOTELS INTERNATIONAL LIMITED as it was then known, the group was one of the largest and most thriving hotel owning and management groups in Asia. So successful was he during his almost 30 years in Cong Kong that he has been featured in cover stories and articles in considerable international business magazines including TIME, Newsweek, FORTUNE, BUSINESS WEEK, and INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT, etc.