When Senator Deborah O’Neill last year forced the parliamentary tabling of the PwC emails that revealed the firm’s breaches of government confidentiality provisions, then-chief Tom Seymour wasn’t too fussed.

The other people on the emails? Not involved, he insisted. The whole thing involved one ex-partner and the firm, to his mind, suffered from a “perception issue”. Or so he told our colleague Jennifer Hewett on stage at the Australian Financial Review Business Summit in May 2023.