Sue, chef? Judge’s warning over Machiavelli restaurant’s bad heir day

6 days ago 5

When restaurateur Giovanna Toppi died in 2021 aged 85, she left behind a $4 million estate and a beloved reputation as “Sydney’s nonna”.

Toppi, who arrived as an immigrant from Italy in the 1950s, built a culinary empire, with her Machiavelli Ristorante becoming the city’s premier power-dining hotspot, entertaining the likes of Mick Jagger, Elton John, Kylie Minogue, Rupert Murdoch, and of course, regular luncher Graham “Richo” Richardson.

Now much of Giovanna’s estate has been shredded, whittled away by two of her children, Paola and Walter Toppi, who have spent years locked in an expensive legal battle over their late mother’s will. The fight reached a conclusion this week in the NSW Supreme Court, where Justice Anthony McGrath delivered a costs order following a July judgment that contained scathing commentary about the conduct of both parties.

During the lengthy dispute, it was revealed that Paola, herself a renowned chef and business partner to her mother, had fallen out with Giovanna to the extent the pair did not speak during the final years of her life.

The court heard an enduring source of tension was Giovanna’s prodigious gambling habit, which placed significant strain on the family’s finances. The pair had also fallen out over a court stoush where they were ordered to repay $1.3 million to WFM Motors, the car dealership founded by Sydney Roosters billionaire chair Nick Politis.

Toppi Sr drew up five wills between 2013 and 2018, each of which made provisions for both Paola and Walter. But Paola was cut out completely from a final 2020 will, and commenced legal proceedings to challenge it. In a 76-page judgment delivered after a near four-year legal battle, McGrath awarded two-thirds of the estate, now worth $1.5 million, to Walter, leaving Paola the rest.

However, both parties spent more than $1 million on the proceedings, a figure described by his honour as “outrageously disproportionate” to the value of Toppi’s estate. In Monday’s costs order, McGrath ordered $750,000 of the estate be paid to Walter, $150,000 to Paola, and the remaining $600,000 left to pay the liabilities of Giovanna’s estate and Paola’s legal fees.

But the judge also reflected with some sadness that the siblings’ “dogged pursuit” of litigation had “resulted only in the depletion of Giovanna’s estate to their joint prejudice”, and noted both parties had conceded they’d be better off had the court battle never escalated.

“This aspect of the parties’ submissions serves to underscore the serious and senseless harm caused by these proceedings, where two siblings fought long and hard and, in the end, neither was truly victorious,” he wrote.

“It is a sad and timely reminder of the perils of litigation of this kind, where the subject matter of the claims concern matters of family, relationships and emotions.”

A cautionary tale to the many litigants who grace the pages of this column.

Get staffed

And now to our friends in the Liberal Party, who continue the slow, painful work of crawling out of the depths of opposition.

New leader Sussan Ley has been too busy putting out fires on the home front of late, in the form of Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (banished to the backbench) and Aussie car enthusiast Andrew “Tasty” Hastie (sidelined on a quest to find the reactionary holy grail: an election-winning constituency of local MAGA enthusiasts who definitely exist).

Once those fires are out, the party’s first female leader faces the immense task of bringing women voters back to the fold. To help that task, the Liberals have recruited a couple of senior female staff to high-profile positions.

Ley has picked up Annabel Clunies-Ross as a senior media adviser – she’s previously held roles with frontbenchers Josh Frydenberg and Angus Taylor. Most recently, she was a principal adviser at the Minerals Council of Australia, who very generously lent her to former leader Peter Dutton’s disastrous election campaign.

Meanwhile, opposition health minister Anne Ruston has a new chief of staff in Sheradyn Holderhead, a former News Corp scribbler and Liberal apparatchik who returns to the Canberra bubble from Washington, DC, where she worked for former federal treasurer Joe Hockey’s lobbying firm, Bondi Partners.

To be honest, we’d probably want out of Donald Trump’s America too.

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