Crown debacle means Crown Resorts chair Helen Coonan has to go right now

Crown Resorts chair Helen Coonan’s evidence to the Victorian Royal Commission was devastating - to herself. Simply, she has to go right now.

Crown Resorts chair Helen Coonan. Picture: Adam Yip

The question is no longer whether Crown casino group chairman Helen Coonan has to go, but when. In my opinion, the answer is right now.

Her evidence Thursday to the Victorian Royal Commission into Crown was devastating – to herself.

In effect, she admitted she had allowed herself to be a figurehead chairman of a still-Packer controlled board of directors all the way through 2020 – she became chairman in January 2020 – up to and including personally signing a key letter in January this year to the Victorian gaming regulator.

As chairman she signed off on a belligerent 31-page letter to the regulator that counsel assisting Adrian Finanzio characterised as “it’s the old Crown, taking every point, arguing every issue, not accepting basic propositions of facts that are clearly open.”

Coonan replied: “I think that’s a fair way to characterise it … it’s the old Crown.”

So why did she do it?

Her answer was she’d been given legal advice that Crown could not change its approach to the regulator until the (NSW) Bergin report was released in February otherwise “it would undermine all of the submissions” made to that preceding inquiry.

So, she signed a letter that did the wrong thing because not to have done so would have exposed Crown as having done the wrong thing all through 2020 at the Bergin inquiry?

Hmm.

She also claimed that it was only the resignations of the directors associated with (James) Packer in February, after the Bergin report was released, that “enabled the remaining directors to get control of the company and take a different approach”.

So, she was stating that she’d been a puppet chairman until then, doing things because the (Packer-controlled) board made her do it?

Indeed, she actually stated that she’d been effectively only a figurehead chairman all the way through 2020 and all the way through the Bergin inquiry.

She said Thursday she had wanted Crown to adopt a different, non-combative posture throughout the Bergin inquiry, but this was resisted by other board members based on legal advice from law firm MinterEllison.

Again, she really can’t have it both ways: by staying chairman she was endorsing the approach.

Did she at any stage through 2020 – and most specifically when it was all coming to a head in early 2021 with that key letter – spell it out to the board that it was “her way or the highway”?

That unless the board was prepared to do the right thing, she would resign as chairman and as a director? Preferably with the two directors that supported her – Jane Halton and John Horvath – joining her?

More broadly, Helen Coonan has made herself the ‘Ken Henry’ of the Crown debacle.

Henry was forced to resign as chairman of the National Bank because he purportedly took an “uncooperative” approach to the Banking Royal Commission.

That was actually a bum rap in my opinion: indeed Henry was actually the only bank chairman or CEO who actually tried to engage with the RC on a really substantive level.

But now it’s Coonan who’s ‘done a Henry’ by signing such an “uncooperative” letter and similarly has to go.

Then there’s the matter of the $1.5m that the now clearly Coonan-controlled board agreed to pay the group’s short-lived CEO Ken Barton when he resigned/ was sacked in February.

This payment for post-departure “advice” was only revealed Thursday.

This told us the statement announcing Barton’s departure was constructively false.

It said Barton would receive entitlements agreed under his employment contract and otherwise as required by law, by company policies, and executive incentive plans.

There was no mention of a special $1.5m – not billion, as one report had it.

This was again the ‘new Coonan Crown’ acting all-too like the ‘old Packer Crown’.

Simply, she has to go.