A new chapter: Retail Food Group boss to do fresh rebuild job

After a few years battling to turn around the fortunes of Gloria Jean’s and Donut King franchisor Retail Food Group, Peter George should be ready to put his feet up with a good book.

For those who don’t follow these matters, George, a former Optus director, was brought into RFG as executive chairman in late 2018 with the company in free-fall, facing full-year losses of more than $300 million, the closure of hundreds of its outlets and an Optus-level publicity nightmare over its treatment of franchisees.

Page turner: Peter George is embarking on his next adventure with eccentric Booktopia founder Tony Nash.Credit: Shakespeare

It’s been a wild ride since then for RFG, with scrutiny from the tax office, Australian Competition & Consumer Commission and the national parliament relating to allegations of breaches of consumer law and mistreatment of its franchisees and suspicions of insider trading, not to mention the small matter of the pandemic.

But by September this year, George was able to report some green shoots, with strong sales growth from Donut King, Gloria Jean’s and Michel’s Patisserie, although trade remained below pre-COVID levels.

So time for the next adventure, and while it does have a literary flavour, taking the helm at Booktopia – the online retailer floated in 2020 by its eccentric entrepreneur founder Tony Nash – doesn’t sound like our idea of a relaxing time.

Nash was effectively forced out of Booktopia’s executive ranks after the company lost more than 90 per cent of its value – a $300 million loss to investors – amid an ill-timed share sale by Nash ahead of a profit warning and the market losing patience with Booktopia’s inability to meet its upbeat earning forecasts.

But now, Nash appears back in the driver’s seat after a purge of the board and was right there in the mix on Tuesday with an announcement welcoming George as Booktopia’s new chairman.

So settle in, this is going to be a real page-turner.

NEWS’ VALUES

We always admire a media company trying to Do Better. The latest piece of corporate image laundering comes from our friends at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, where CEO Robert Thomson sent a missive to staff this week outlining the media empire’s new Standards of Business Conduct and its commitment to “the highest legal and ethical standards”.

Staff will undergo training where they’ll get to hear from company leaders, and watch real-life scenarios from the business exemplifying those values.

We wonder, then, if the recent troubles at News Corp headquarters will be used as an example of what not to do. Just weeks ago, The Australian’s editor-in-chief Chris Dore parted ways with the company after allegedly making lewd comments to a woman at an event in the United States.

Surely that behaviour doesn’t meet Thomson’s standards. Neither does the company’s response – where staff were kept entirely in the dark over the reasons for Dore’s abrupt departure.

Thomson ended his note by urging employees to “please be passionate about being principled”.

We hope everyone at the empire takes those hollow words to heart.

SPECTATOR SPORT

We brought word on Thursday that former Labor state tourism minister Martin Pakula was off to a flying start in life after politics with a non-executive director’s gig at the formerly Liberal-adjacent Helloworld.

Now that he is no longer the member for Kew, car crash Liberal Tim Smith is also looking to find his way in the real world and it’s hard to see much out there for him other than a career in the right-wing commentariat, a surprisingly easy place to make a living.

Former state Liberal MP Tim Smith.Credit: Justin McManus

And he too is off to a decent start. After going OK on Sky News’ election night panel, Smith has penned an eye-catching piece for conservative fan-zine Spectator Australia where some former colleagues came in for the kind of treatment that might just earn Tim a spot on Sky after dark or a column in a right-wing tabloid.

There’s former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull (delusional), former Victorian Liberals leader Michael O’Brien (hid “under the doona” during the pandemic) and former Liberal premier Ted Baillieu (“had no agenda, stood for nothing”).

If Smith keeps showing that sort of form, we think the kid will be all right.

LEGAL DRAMA

The boss of the embattled Administrative Appeals Tribunal has resigned just eight months after being hired by former Liberal attorney-general Michaelia Cash.

Fiona Meagher’s appointment was among the last of the Coalition’s appointments to the tribunal in its nine years in government, during which at least 79 former Liberal Party politicians, candidates, former staffers and party associates were hired, some on salaries approaching $500,000.

Meagher’s background was in law and commerce rather than politics, but the problems facing the tribunal have continued to mount since her appointment with 19 members accused of workplace bullying, harassment or discrimination in the past six years.

Those revelations and the mounting delays facing applicants to the tribunal prompted Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, who had flagged in June that he wanted changes to what he described as a “Liberal Party employment agency”, to seek an explanation this month from Meagher about what was going on in the institution.

Dreyfus’ office told CBD on Thursday morning that it had accepted Meagher’s resignation, thanked her for her service and confirmed that Federal Court judge Berna Collier would act as interim president.

The tribunal was in Labor’s sights since before it took government with a parliamentary legal and constitutional affairs committee, led by now-retired Labor veteran Kim Carr, calling for the tribunal to be scrapped and re-established.

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