Babcock & Brown boss Phil Green is the richest non-founder CEO of an Australian listed company with a net worth approaching $500 million. His remarkable success has come from building trust and forging strong relationships with many of Australia’s biggest companies and richest families.

Neil Chenoweth, undisclosed author of the mysterious Prince column in the Weekend AFR, on Saturday revealed that Phil was the brother of murdered solicitor Max Green, author of one of Australia’s most audacious frauds. Phil’s brother breached trust like few before him by stealing $42 million from a range of wealthy Melbourne families back in 1997. He was found murdered in a Cambodian hotel room in March 1998.

Phil had nothing to do with the fraud and even Max’s partner at the time, Bill Lewski, was left completely unawares.

During the subsequent court battles, Max Green’s advisers were represented in court by the late Peter Hayes QC, who himself died of a drug overdose in an Adelaide hotel room earlier this year, although those two events are not connected.

It’s fair to say that having a nefarious brother and business partner hasn’t stopped the rise of Phil Green or Bill Lewski. Indeed, Babcock & Brown Communities (BBC), the reincarnated retirement village play Primelife, has just made Lewski a wealthy man by paying him $60 million on September 11 for the management rights to 12 retirement villages in NSW and Queensland (see page 7 of this presentation).

I’ve tried to explain all the connections on a whiteboard in this videoblog but one other interesting element is that former Federal Health Minister Michael Wooldridge is the chairman of Lewski’s $500 million Prime Retirement group, which recently floated and still owns the 12 centres that BBC is now managing.

Lewski is still managing director but he only owns 3.5%. The expansive related party transactions section of the Prime prospectus shows how he got rich from all those management contracts. It also helped sourcing investors by paying huge fees to controversial financial planners such as Richard Beck and Neil Burnard’s Kebbel Group.

Whilst Phil Green doesn’t apparently enjoy dealing with Lewski, he’s used to the colourful retirement village industry – which has boomed courtesy of John Howard’s huge spending on the elderly.

Babcock first entered the game in late 2003 after buying a 20% stake in Primelife from Ted Sendt, the bloke who used to pay Mick Gatto boot loads of cash to settle industrial disputes and deal with death threats, at $2.55. They clawed some of this back in a put option deal but Babcock & Brown Communities is today trading at a miserable $1.05, after recently raising $475 million at $1.15.