Pinchas "Piniek" Ben Shmuel Zev (Hebrew: פנחס בן שמואל זב) (1 January 1911 – 7 April 1985), known professionally as Paul Fayman, was a successful international property developer, businessman and film maker based in Melbourne, Australia. He had significant interests in shopping centres, office buildings, hotels, residential estates and industrial sites – serving as the chief executive officer and deputy chairman of Hanover Holdings and the Austram Corporation. He was also a prominent member of his local Jewish community.

Fayman was born in the industrial city of Sosonowiec, Poland. His dad was a livestock trader. According to Yitzchok Dovid Groner, he had a "very Jewish upbringing". Fayman recalled his youth in a 1969 interview with The Herald:

"Then the nazis marched through. We were Jewish, and in 1942 they split us up and carted us off to various concentration camps ... I managed to survive the camps, mainly by good luck. I ended up being liberated from Buchenwald by the Americans. I spent the next year or so as a refugee tramping through Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland looking for my family, but I couldn't find anyone. Back in our home town they gave me various leads and I finally discovered that my younger sister Cesia was alive and living in a town in Germany."^[1]

When the Berlin Blockade started his sister, Cesia, decided to move to Australia fearing another European War. Paul, who had married, decided a few months later to also leave Europe. He picked America and had his papers ready, his bags packed. "But when I rang Cesia in Melbourne she was so upset at the thought of the two remaining member of the family splitting this way that I decided, on the spot, to make Australia my new home too." Arriving in 1952, he had just enough money to buy a home in Northcote, and began looking to buy a small business.^[2]

After learning most of his family had died or been killed in war camps, Fayman began looking for a job. "For a long time I didn't know what to do. I had somehow lost the urge to work. Then I got a break. The Americans were selling some disposal goods from their PXs – chocolates, soap and other items. I became a wholesaler".^[1]

Upon arriving in Australia in 1952, he invested his limited resources into a small wholesale meat business at Oakover Road in Preston, which he ran in partnership with fellow immigrant Max Siegel.^{[Note 1][3]} He worked 16 hours a day for four years, then sold out. "I was making money but I was sick and tired of meat" he recalled.^[1] He bought a delicatessen in Melbourne, and soon had a chain of 33 stores spread around the city. He sold them too, and bought into the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda just before the Summer Olympics. He hoped for late closing, but it was one gamble he lost. "Unfortunately, a large block booking was cancelled, which, coupled with other problems, gave us a hard struggle which lasted two years."^[4]

He gave up the hotel, and, pooling funds with four partners, bought a controlling interest worth about $310,000 in Wright & Bros. – an old-established string of delicatessens which had branches in the Melbourne CBD and in suburbs like Collingwood, Malvern and Prahran.^{[Note 2][5]} After taking control of the company, he strategically expanded its scope of operations by leading a program to diversify, creating subsidiaries that invested in property development, retail and produce wholesaling.^{[Note 3]} "But, with self-service upon us, I realised the shops were too small. So we sold them off at quite a nice profit". He later bought the Newport Freezing Works, citing that he "wanted to develop the area for realestate but decided to keep the firm going, now it employs 900 men and this year will export $20 million of lamb and beef overseas."

In the late 1940s, Fayman wanted to produce a film showing what the Germans had done to the Jews. He got into political hot water and although it was completed, it was never shown. The film is now considered lost media, and may still be held by the Fayman estate.^[1]

The funds realised from the sale of the delicatessens were channeled into his first conventional venture into real estate – home building.^[4] "Then I turned to real estate. In those days it was so easy, you could sell of a map, you didn't even need to make roads." In 1959, Fayman started a company called Development Consolidated P/L with business partner John S. Emmanuel, consolidating their real estate interests under one parent organisation.^[6] He started building shops and leasing them to Woolworths, Coles and Safeway.^[1]

Fayman's developments were typically located in Melbourne's outer suburbs and usually employed a mixed-use strategy incorporating residential, commercial and industrial lots. Early examples of this include the Borrack Square Shopping Centre, Central Hotel and adjoining 110-lot housing estate at Altona North (developed 1959–61)^[7][8] and a 90-lot housing estate with a strip of shops, industrial sites and the Monash Hotel at Clayton (developed 1960–63).^[9] Many of their developments were carried out under the banner of separate, affiliate companies such as the 200-lot Forest Hill Heights housing estate and adjacent Forest Hill Shopping Centre which were built between 1959 and 1964 by his company Forest Hill Heights P/L.^{[Note 4][10]}

In July 1960, Development Consolidated advised the Minister for Public Works of their plans to develop an Australian version of America's Disneyland called "Australialand" on a 500-acre site in Laverton. Plans were officially announced four months later in The Age, which proposed “educational exhibits, together with the more customary forms of children’s entertainment”.^[11] The Board of Works had issued provisional approval, but the project was ultimately abandoned and the land was sold.^[12]

Upon hearing the news, Walt Disney's representative in Australia, Walter A. Grainger issued a strong warning on Disney's behalf:

“Walt Disney Productions and Disney Inc. of California, the originators and proprietors of ‘Disneyland’, deem it necessary, in the interest of the public and likely investors, to state that they have no connection with or interest in any proposed amusement park in Australia … Also, formal warning is given that the misuse of the name ‘Disneyland’ and the possible deception of the public may involve penalties at law.”^[13]

In December 1964, Fayman established Masaga Investments P/L to act as the parent organisation for his companies. Developers Maurice Alter and George Herscu joined Masaga and in 1968, they bought a controlling interest in Allans Finance; the hire-purchase subsidiary of music retailer Allan & Co. They turned this into Hanover Holdings, which was a big player in the Melbourne property boom of the 1970s, boosting profits from $67,122 in 1969 to a reported peak of over $1.8m in 1973. The bubble burst in 1974, causing profits to plummet to $631,000.^[14]