Australia Post’s Ahmed Fahour: from Carlton boy to the public face of overpaid CEOs

AHMED Fahour is the self-made boy from Carlton who achieved the impossible at Australia Post — only to become the public face of overpaid CEOs.

AHMED Fahour is the self-made boy from Carlton who achieved the impossible by reforming Australia Post only to become the public face of overpaid CEOs.

When Fahour started with Post seven years ago, he had the basic order to save the place.

Letter volumes were falling off a cliff as Aussies turned to email.

He boasted a background like nobody else about to enter public service.

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Fahour had been a director of Boston Consulting Group and had worked as head of corporate development for Citigroup in New York.

He was on his way to Manhattan, preparing to work with Citi’s “masters of the universe” when the planes hit the World Trade Centre.

(“People were going crazy, but I thought it was normal New York crazy,” he later told media).

On returning to Australia in 2004, he served six months as Citibank Australia chief but was then made National Australia Bank’s Australian chief.

Many believed he would get the top job but instead it went to fellow banker Cameron Clyne.

Some attribute missing the top job at NAB to Fahour’s driven personality which grated with some old-timers.

The man who replaced Clyne is Andrew Thorburn, a fellow self-made man and someone Fahour hired and championed.

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Ahmed Fahour, seen here at the 2015 Melbourne Cup, enjoys a little pampering in the Birdcage.

People who know Fahour say the drive comes from a proud family background in which he was the eldest of eight children of Lebanese immigrants living in a Lygon St terrace house.

He learned about business at the family’s Middle Eastern bakery downstairs.

When he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in January, Mr Fahour revealed a teacher told him he should think of alternatives to university, maybe taking a trade.

“I thought, ‘hang on, I know English is my second language’. I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon, I didn’t have tutors or anything like that,” he said.

“But I thought, I’m going to have a go. I’m not going to give this away due to someone’s opinion.”

But it is also a drive and ambition that can put people off-side. Particularly as he has accumulated the obvious signs of wealth as he has gone about transforming a long beloved institution.

Fahour enjoys fast postal deliveries — but even faster cars.

Last week it was revealed he was forking out an eye-watering $200,000 to remove just one tree from his $20 million 1846 Gothic-style riverside homestead in Hawthorn.

In 2015, the year Post sunk into a loss for the first time since it was corporatised, it was also revealed Fahour had bought a Maserati with the licence plates “AMAZZN”.

Many said it was not a good look for someone who was also battling to jack up stamp prices and introduce a two-tiered delivery service as a part of regulatory reform he said was essential for the service to survive.

At the same time, it was revealed Post was seeking to make 1900 voluntary redundancies over three years.

But the reforms — married with the postal service’s push into parcels — seem to be working, with group profit before tax up from last year’s result of $1 million to $197 million, revealed Thursday morning.

Post chairman John Stanhope thinks the public purse would be a lot worse off without Fahour — to the tune of billions.

“By remaining a self-funded business, the taxpayer avoided a potential $6.7 billion bailout over the next decade. Instead, Australia Post has received no taxpayer money but delivered to government over $4 billon in dividends, taxes and community service obligation funding in the past seven years,” Mr Stanhope said on Thursday.

The chairman says whoever takes over Post now has a sustainable company and the task of fully transforming it to a parcels and e-commerce-centric business connected to Asia.

But it was the culture of receiving a private sector-sized wage that drew the public’s ire — just as success was arriving.

“I think that salary, that remuneration is too high,” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said when it was revealed Fahour earned $5.6 million last year, more than 10 times that of the PM.

Fahour (right) hams it up with former federal treasurer Peter Costello it out on the water during the annual KPMG Couta Boat Race at Sorrento back in 2010.

In a chain of correspondence since a Senate estimates hearing in October, Australia Post argued its executives may become targets for unwarranted media attention and it may lead to brand damage for the government-owned business.

Company documents showed Fahour received a $4.4 million salary and a $1.2 million bonus last financial year.

It was already known he received a wage beyond $4 million.

The addition of another $1 million on top of that was as much the problem as the fact Post concealed it, insiders say.

People who know Fahour suspect he did not expect to stay long in the job, certainly not seven years, which is the longest position he has held.

The question is, where does someone with such a unique CV — and public persona — go next?