Nursing homes blame Royal Commission for profit falls

Despite the damning revelations of the aged care royal commission, and the legal fees companies are spending in their defence, the executives are still pocketing huge salaries.

TAXPAYER-funded aged care firms have spent millions of dollars in legal fees to defend themselves before the royal commission, while paying big bucks to bosses.

As nursing homes cry poor despite record federal government funding amid royal commission findings of widespread abuse and neglect, The Courier-Mail can reveal that some bosses pocketed million-dollar salaries this year.

Queensland’s first LGBTI aged care facility to open its doors

More money for nursing homes as nursing care cut

Qld’s most shameful aged-care revelations

And companies that shared in $15 billion of taxpayer funding to care for the elderly in nursing homes this financial year are blaming “adverse publicity’’ for falling profits.

Japara Healthcare founder and chief executive Andrew Sudholz – who was blasted as “belligerent’’ by the royal commission – earned a $1,032,000 salary package this year.

Mr Sudholz had labelled a woman “vexatious” after she used a hidden camera to record carers repeatedly assault her father, Clarence Hausler, at Japara’s Mitcham nursing home in South Australia in 2015.

The royal commission found that Mr Hausler “was the subject of a series of degrading assaults’’ while his daughter “had to contend with an organisation determined to avoid accountability for its actions”.

It named Mr Sudholz as “belligerent in his ignorance of these serious events”.

Mr Sudholz told the royal commission how he was “distraught’’ that during a meeting with residents’ relatives in 2016, “there were a number of people who were very abusive, very aggressive towards me, shouted me down and showed little respect to me as the CEO of a big organisation’’.

Japara’s latest annual report reveals he was paid more than $1 million this year but “volunteered’’ to take a $200,000 pay cut in August, in recognition of the difficult operating environment and Japara’s financial performance.

However the pay cut will be cancelled out by a “one-off grant of equity”.

Japara received $288 million in Federal Government funding this year for its 4000 residents and turned an after-tax profit of $16.4 million.

Regis Healthcare received $452 million in taxpayer revenue, posted a $51 million post-tax profit and paid chief executive Ross Johnston $1,032,251 before he left the company in September.