Babcock & Brown: Australia’s last top model

The imitation of Macquarie is proving anything but flattering. The Australian investment firm’s opaque, complex and highly leveraged business model provided much of the inspiration for its smaller domestic rival, Babcock & Brown - and with disastrous consequences. Lenders are forcing B&B to sell down its portfolio of rail, property and power assets to pay back a third of its A$3.3bn (E1.7bn) of debt in the coming two years. Shareholders, who not long ago were sitting on a company worth A$12bn, h...