Jarden boss James Lee appoints himself co-CEO; Mercedes Benz case puts ‘pigs’ in the spotlight

Jarden group chief James Lee has taken a leaf out of former PM Scott Morrison’s playbook and appointed himself co-CEO of the firm’s local investment banking division.

Jarden Australia CEO Robbie Vanderzeil. Picture: Attila Szilvasi.

It’s not just the former prime minister stealthily co-opting other people’s jobs.

Over at Jarden it appears that group chief James Lee has appointed himself co-CEO of the Australian investment banking division, effectively pulling a Scott Morrison on the local bureau chief Robbie Vanderzeil.

The news was announced to staff in a recent internal memo but not to stakeholders, oddly, with Lee telling employees that, as part of a restructure, he would “double-hat at both the group and divisional (investment banking) level.”

“Robbie Vanderzeil will co-head this business line (which encompasses Australia and NZ) alongside myself,” Lee wrote in mid-June.

Robbie Vanderzeil. Picture: Attila Szilvasi.

For someone who insists on putting “our clients at the centre of everything we do”, as Lee wrote in the same memo, it’s strikingly unusual that stakeholders were never informed of this adjustment. The Jarden website similarly remains mute on these, well, updates to the firm’s executive management.

Moreover – and as we’ve learned from the ScoMo experience – double-hatting isn’t normally required when one’s operations are well-oiled running with a high degree of competency. But at least Vanderzeil was informed of this usurping of his role, unlike Josh Frydenberg, Karen Andrews and Mathias Cormann.

All this, of course, during a difficult week for Jarden Australia, which has recruited external consultants for an investigation into claims of workplace misconduct involving two of its male staff. As The Australian reported this week, the matter has allegedly prompted a female researcher to exit the firm.

Well known, too, in Sydney’s shallow pool of corporate finance is the civil war fomenting between Jarden’s Australian and NZ outposts, leading to a breakdown in communications and, evidently, some important management calls which have been missed.

We couldn’t help but feel this dysfunction was on full display on Thursday, when Jarden NZ was still deploying its digital ads on the New Zealand Herald website, unfortunately smack bang alongside the paper’s coverage of Jarden’s workplace harassment scandal.

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High on the hog

Who knew that pigs held such a hallowed place in Germanic mythology?

Earlier this month, barrister Tim Castle SC presented a series of slides to the Federal Court during the ongoing matter between Mercedes Benz dealerships and their mothership, the German automotive giant.

The documents, created by Mercedes Benz head office, were seized upon by Castle as something of a Perry Mason moment – if we can borrow that term from a very recent US defamation proceeding – namely because an image in one of the slides depicted the Mercedes dealerships as piglets.

For obvious reasons, few people would want to be likened to a pig, so the moment was cast as an unfortunate one for the car manufacturer. It remains at odds with the dealerships over the introduction of an agency model for selling cars, introduced in January. The dealers claim that the model will cripple their earnings by forcing them to sell cars at a fixed price, limiting their bargaining power with buyers.

Illustration: Rod Clement

But, as the court heard on Friday, the portrayal of the dealerships as some form of swine really comes down to a matter of perspective, or so went the evidence of Jason Nomikos, a Mercedes Benz executive, who was cross-examined by Castle during the morning.

Asked about the offending slide, Nomikos corrected Castle and said the animals depicted were not, in fact, “little pigs”.

“They are wild boars,” Nomikos said. And why were dealers depicted as wild boars?

It turns out Nomikos has a deep level of respect for boars. He even has one perched on his desk at home; an award trophy provided to him by his superiors in 2011 for some unexplained achievement. He said: “Maybe it’s not an Australian thing, but boars actually represent certain characteristics, including courage, tenacity and luck.”

For the record, Margin Call went fossicking through the weeds of Google to confirm the veracity of this description and, sure enough, Nomikos’s explanation certainly has legs, or hocks, as one might say.

“There was no disrespect intended,” Nomikos added. “It was actually representing us and the retailers not always in agreement and both having quite a strong position. They (boars) are highly respected in folklore and mythology.”

But not, it appears, in Australia where, in the words of Jules Winnfield, we still don’t dig on swine.

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Tell us what you know

We were expecting more jousting from battery manufacturing group Magnis Energy Technologies in its quest to uncover the true identities of 15 anonymous users of the HotCopper messaging board.

But unfortunately there will be no great spectacle, with solicitors for HotCopper laying down their arms and agreeing this week to provide the full names, addresses, email addresses, and IP data for those who allegedly made “offending posts” about Magnis.

Magnis Energy chairman Frank Poullas. Picture: Britta Campion / The Australian

They also seem to have upset its chairman, Frank Poullas, who is named as an applicant in Magnis’s application. No stranger to the legal sandbox, Poullas is eager to get his hands on the user details of “Mondrian”, “Fritzl”, “Rat1973”, “Pickmeamonkey” and other scallywags after lodging papers in July against Report Card Pty Ltd, the operating entity behind HotCopper, helmed by Jag Sanger, publisher of The Market Herald.

The case has yet to progress much further, with both Magnis and Poullas thus far refusing to comment on the matter. Magnis was ordered to pay costs, and the court has ordered that the user details be provided by Thursday.

Originally published as Jarden boss James Lee appoints himself co-CEO; Mercedes Benz case puts ‘pigs’ in the spotlight