Steven Gregg once boasted that it took less than a week for the Ampol board to appoint him chairman after his predecessor, Greig Gailey, quit suddenly in mid-2017. “It was a quick process,” Mr Gregg told The Constant Investor podcast the next May. “But it was a very open and thoughtful process.”

It was a return to the chairman’s club after a three-year absence for Mr Gregg, who had last led a blue-chip board in 2014 when he oversaw the $1.3 billion sale of food giant Goodman Fielder to First Pacific and Wilmar International.