Commissioner must play waiting game on Crown as Packer, Coonan gamble

Crown Resorts chair Helen Coonan Picture: Robert Edwards

James Packer played his ace card hard and early. For now, Crown chair Helen Coonan is keeping her cards close to her chest.

Packer’s closing submission to the Crown inquiry last week went to the heart of the billionaire’s rebuttals of the serious allegations against him within the first hour of his lawyer Noel Hutley’s address.

But Crown’s counsel, Neil Young, was clear on Monday that he was saving the best till last.

What Commissioner Patricia Bergin said she wants to hear are the critical steps Crown plans to take to render itself suitable to retain the licence for its Sydney casino after a raft of damning allegations against it and after counsels assisting the inquiry claimed Crown’s current remediation plans are inadequate. But she will need to be patient.

Crown’s investors have been in Coonan’s ear in the past month urging her to cut ties with two of Packer’s nominee directors, Guy Jalland and Michael Johnston, and to accept Bergin’s potential olive branch of a plan to reduce Packer’s voting power in Crown to less than 10 per cent while allowing him to keep his 37 per cent stake in the gaming giant.

They also want an orderly clean-out of the current board.

There was nothing in Young’s opening arguments on Monday to address these crucial issues.

Instead, he spent most of the day discussing the minutiae of the China arrests, addressing Crown’s alleged failures that led to the detention and jailing of its staff in October 2016.

Young’s bigger-picture opening points went to the same basic argument made by Packer: Context. He claimed counsels assisting made assertions regarding Crown’s failures that made it unsuitable to hold the Sydney licence “in a piecemeal fashion that pays no regard to the conscientious steps Crown has taken to address failings identified over past years”.

He also noted that the Sydney VIP gaming facility was like no other casino in Australia: It won’t be open to the general public and its members and guests will be thoroughly scrutinised — with background security checks and patron photographs.

Young argued that while the evidence presented to the inquiry showed some serious mistakes and shortcomings in the past at Crown, none went to the dishonesty and a lack of integrity of the people involved.

Most importantly, he stressed that suitability had to be considered in the current context — the China arrests happened four years ago and, given the changes in processes and management at Crown since then, were not relevant to a judgment of current suitability.

While Crown’s management structures were not engaged in relation to its China business, which led to significant mistakes being made, Young said those decisions needed to be considered in the context of other vital matters at the time and not with the perspective of hindsight.

But Bergin appears fixated about one critical point when it comes to the China arrests: the Crown board’s failure to conduct a proper root-cause review of what happened because of a class action launched against the company in 2017. It is something that clearly angered former director Ben Brazil.

Time after time Bergin has returned to the issue and did so again on Monday. Young argued a thorough review was undertaken with the context of Crown’s response to the class action. But Bergin remained unconvinced.

We’ve seen a number of illustrations during this inquiry of the iron grip Crown’s lawyers, Minter Ellison, seemingly have over their client. The coming critical days of Young’s evidence will reveal whether Coonan has convinced them in any way to let go.