How can you tell when James Packer and his current girlfriend are
no longer an item? When she ends up with a multi-million dollar
property!

We are
indebted to the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Saturday gossip column “PS” for the latest
update on the financial side of the Packer romances.

In fact
Andrew Hornery, the author, was responsible for
breaking the story a month ago that Packer and Baxter were no longer an item;
news that rival gossip columnists, especially on some News Ltd papers, found
hard to come to terms with.

By now
they have fallen into line but were strangely silent on the Baxter windfall
yesterday

According to the SMH,Baxter has ended up with a $4.25
million house in ritzy Vaucluse; this is on top of the
shares in Challenger Financial Services she emerged with two years ago, which are now
worth $2 million.

The
Baxter windfall more than matches the financial settlement accorded former wife
Jodhi Meares: she
got properties worth several millions of dollars for herself and members of her
family, her swimwear business has a new head office and is about to open its
first store. She made more than $3 million in 2002 selling a home occupied by
her mother which was purchased by the Packer family in the mid
1990s.

These
settlements, though large should viewed against the reported $750,000 cost of
chipping his string of polo ponies to Britain where he is now.


It has
been a good way of escaping the Jodee Rich testimony
in the ASIC OneTel case and avoiding all the
unpleasantness associated with the downsizing of the Nine
Network.

And the
former girlfriend, Kate Fischer, also received a multi-million settlement and
sold a Bondi house she shared with Packer for $2.8
million back in 2000.