The Black Tree Group was set up in 2005 by a group of highly experienced forestry managers and investors. The Black Tree group has a long established track record in hardwood plantation management as well as advising on, helping manage and investing in large scale integrated forestry and agricultural projects. Many of the Black Tree executive team have had long standing direct investments in large scale plantations. Their skills base in direct forestry, forestry company management and finance covers the full gamut needed to successfully manage substantial forestry plantations. In addition they have direct experience in the successful restructuring of MIS forestry assets in financial difficulties.
Black Tree has a strong shareholder base which includes a number of major investors in both the timber and financial sector. The company has secured substantial funding to cover both the purchase of fixed assets such as land as well as the working capital requirements needed to manage large scale forestry assets.
None of the Black Tree management team or shareholders has any financial or operational involvement in any of the recently collapsed MIS companies.
Tony Jack, Executive Chairman and Partner
The founder and former CEO of Integrated Tree Cropping, one of the original and most successful of the major plantation managers in Australia. Under his stewardship ITC established over 100,000 hectares of timber plantations. As the former CEO of this major MIS timber operator Tony brings significant past MIS experience, including leading the team that completed the only prior reconstruction of a major forestry MIS business in insolvency (Australian Plantation Timber in 2002).
Tony currently manages an experienced forestry team within Black Tree which has recently completed 2 large scale projects integrating forestry, cropping and grazing.
He owns sandalwood and eucalyptus plantations in Western Australia and has strong relationships with Japanese paper companies and trading houses. In addition Tony has developed strong relationships with Northern Australian Aboriginal groups, assisting with their commercial and investment businesses, largely on a pro-bono basis.
David Marshall, Partner
A former senior investment banker, David has over 25 years experience in the financial sector, covering capital markets and structured finance, lending, treasury management and credit assessment. After working at Citibank for 6 years he was subsequently Executive Director for Treasury & Capital Markets at NZI Australia and then Executive Director, Capital Markets at National Australia Limited, the merchant banking arm of the NAB.
Upon leaving banking, he held various senior corporate management positions including Managing Director of a joint venture with van Eyk Research. In this role David was directly responsible for assessing corporate and project risk on behalf of major institutions and financial planning networks and to that end reviewed over 300 projects in the agri-business sector, most of them operating under the MIS regime. He assisted the Senate enquiry into this sector and has provided expert reports to government agencies such as ASIC.
Over the last 15 years David has been heavily involved in early stage companies with a particular focus on agri-business and the timber sector.This included co-founding Timber 2000 in the Green Triangle in the mid 1990's with Harry Youngman. David has worked with Black Tree Management for the last 4 years on large scale (integrated) agricultural and plantation projects in southern Australia.
Harry Youngman, Director and Partner
Harry is a large scale and successful agri-business operator based in western Victoria with substantial farming and forestry enterprises throughout south eastern Australia. He is a leader in developing and managing integrated farming enterprises.
Harry is one of the pioneers in establishing the blue gum industry in the Green Triangle region where he co-founded Timber 2000 in the mid 1990's with David Marshall. Timber 2000 initiated discussions with major Australian and Japanese wood chip buyers while concurrently generating large scale plantings by local land owners. Harry commenced planting blue gums in the mid 1990’s and is now the owner of substantial pulpwood plantations and agricultural land in the Green Triangle region. In this capacity he has successfully negotiated off-take agreements with a major Japanese pulp and paper group.
Harry is also a director and shareholder of a Melbourne based property developer and manager with residential and commercial projects throughout Eastern Australia.
Rob de Fégely, Principal Advisor
Rob is one of the most experienced and well regarded forestry experts in Australia and Asia with over 28 years in the forestry industry in both operations and management. This includes 10 years as head of industry leader, Jaakko Pöyry Consulting, now Pöyry Forest Industry (www.poyry.com) in Australia where he was a Principal of the Asia Pacific Management team. He is very well connected and understands the forestry and agricultural industry in Australia and internationally. Importantly he has a deep knowledge of the players and the supply and demand for hardwood woodchips in the Asia Pacific region.
He was appointed by the Federal Minister to a Special Advisory Group for the Asia Pacific Forestry Skills and Capacity Building Program run by the Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry and is currently chair of a major timber group in the Pacific region.
Rob established and runs forestry estates in southern NSW which includes a eucalypt seed orchard.
Paul Cotterill
One of the world’s leading eucalypt tree breeders, Paul has over 30 years of experience in genetic improvement of forest trees. His experience includes 17 years with CSIRO, where he was ultimately promoted to Chief of the Division of Forestry & Forest Products. Paul also worked in Portugal and Brazil for 9 years with Stora Enso, one of the world’s largest forestry products companies.
He currently runs Gene Technics, which consults to international forest owners on all aspects of tree breeding, and Worrolong Eucalypts, one of Australia’s major producers of improved eucalypt tree seed.
Kym Sandover
Kym Sandover has 15 years experience evaluating approximately 80,000 ha of land across Australia for suitability for forestry operations. He was a senior executive at ITC and has developed Geographical Information Systems for private and publicly listed companies. He is very experienced in working with field workers in capturing spatial data on plantations and translating it into high level maps for forestry management purposes. As an adjunct to this Kym managed the development of a fully integrated spatial data base for clients of Black Tree and is familiar with most aspects of GSL’s land management systems.
Kym is highly skilled in the analysis of aerial photography for use in land evaluation and map production. He has also developed a new data collection and information management system for the integration of cropping and tree plantings to take advantage of advances in auto steering systems, enabling spatial data and yield maps to be rapidly developed to optimize operations and generate information for company financial systems.
Margaret Good
Margaret Good has 14 years experience as an Office Manager and Systems Administrator within the forestry industry with ITC and subsequently Black Tree.
Whilst at ITC Margaret managed the development of the Management Information Systems to cater for a twenty-fold increase in the area of forestry estate under management (up to 120,000 ha when she left) and an increase in staff numbers from 5 to 60.
She has developed MIS systems for Black tree clients which included the development and training of staff in SharePoint as the centralized information management system.