How Toni Korsanos helped repair Crown’s casino while fighting for her own survival
Toni Korsanos reveals the untold story of getting casino giant Crown back on track during her own life-or-death battle that has made her ‘ready for anything’.
January 4, 2017 is a date that will live long in the memory for Toni Korsanos.
The lump she had felt in one of her breasts five months earlier – when she received a false negative result, where a cancer scan appears normal yet the reality is anything but – hadn’t gone away.
This time the results of her mammogram were concerning. Her doctor ordered an immediate biopsy but he need not have bothered. Deep down she knew.
To this day, his words delivering the devastating diagnosis still ring in her ears like it was yesterday.
“I had gone to the scan on my own. The doctors immediately shut down the centre I was at. They all came into the room and sat with me, so that was very nice of them,” she recalls of what was the most difficult day of her life.
Her daughter, Athena, was about to start year 7. Her son, Angellos, was going into year 10.
“I then rang my husband, who was out with the kids, and I said, ‘You’ve got to come home. It’s not good’.
“When they came home and I told the kids, we just sat there silently together. They were very mature. We’ve always done everything together as a family.”
Today the director of Penfolds winemaker Treasury Wine Estates and listed US gaming firm Light & Wonder – formerly known as Scientific Games – reveals that her experience of being diagnosed with breast cancer was “like hitting a wall at full speed”.
For 48 years, the former accountant-turned food and gaming executive who was chief financial officer at Aristocrat Leisure for eight years and a former director of Webjet and Ardent Leisure, had relished being in control of everything in her life.
Now she was seemingly at the mercy of a disease that did not discriminate.
Within days of the diagnosis she was in surgery. A second procedure was required a few weeks later.
“I had my second surgery the day my daughter started high school and I wasn’t there for that. So that was heartbreaking, because I’ve always been there for my kids,” she says softly.
Korsanos, deeply proud of her Greek heritage, was the first in her family to be confronted with a cancer battle.
Her parents, John and Athina, had immigrated to Sydney by boat from their home town in the south of Greece in the 1960s.
Her father came with just a suitcase and £20. To this day they still live happily in the family home at Croydon in Sydney’s inner west.
“I consider myself a strong, resilient person of courage and I absolutely learnt that from my parents; every day was an adventure for them,” she says.
“They came here with nothing, built a home, family and friends. Adversity was not an issue for them.
“I was named after my grandmother. I like the depth of history and what my family signifies.”
Her strength of character was evident by her decision in mid 2017 to subject herself to a thorough interview process after being invited to join the board of gaming giant Crown Resorts, which was then backed by billionaire James Packer.
Now she reveals that at the time, she was undergoing intense chemotherapy treatment.
“The thing I wanted to control was I wanted to keep going. I didn’t want to feel sick and I didn’t want to be weak,” she declares.
She left her clinical treatment at the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse centre in Camperdown to her medical team and focused on what she could control: her health through diet and exercise.
She even used the gym at the centre before each of her chemotherapy sessions.
“Chemo used to be every Monday at 9am. I couldn’t be in the gym on my own, so somebody would always come with me. That was either my husband, Angelo, my mum or my beautiful friend, Sophia,” she says.
“Eventually they would be tapping me on the shoulder so I could get off the treadmill. I literally put a towel around my neck and went upstairs, covered in sweat, to start my chemo. But doing that got me through.”
By the end of September 2017, when she had finished undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment, she felt the fittest she had been in her life.
However, there had been dark moments when she prepared herself and the family for what could have become a grim reality.
“On one hand I didn’t want to feel sick but on the other side of it, I was thinking ‘How do I get my family ready if I’m not here?’ Because I wanted my kids to never worry about anything,” she says.
“I wanted them to be able to tackle their problems and solve them on their own.”
At the end of 2017 Crown announced that Korsanos would become a director.
She now believes the life and death experience of the previous year prepared her for the storm that was to come and the challenges that are still to eventuate in her life.
She will never forget standing in the centre of the Melbourne Cricket Ground in August last year for the Breast Cancer Network Australia’s (BCNA) annual Field of Women day.
With her that day were her husband, children and friends Caroline, Steve and former Aristocrat Leisure chief Jamie Odell.
“It was a moving event,” she says.
“It truly emphasises the number of people touched by breast cancer.”
A high-stakes decision
Korsanos still can’t quite believe the events that transpired at Crown during the three-and-a-half years of her tenure.
Revelations of a string of governance, risk-management and cultural failings prompted three public inquiries; investigations by the corporate and financial crimes regulators, two class actions, a clean-out of the board and senior management ranks, and the end of the Packer family’s influence.
Never before has she spoken publicly about her time at Crown. She now quips that she “could have done without it, but is much better for it”.
“I’m not somebody who will walk away from a problem. I was on that board so I saw myself as accountable for fixing the problem. They were all legacy issues. I had nothing to do with them. But it wasn’t about a blame game,” she says.
“It would have been easy to walk. But then it wouldn’t have been easy for the person that I am and the character I am.”
She reveals there were plenty of friends and advisers telling her to get out.
“But if I had walked there would have been less than three directors on what was an Australian listed company,” she says.
“That would have left my shareholders and other stakeholders with a lot of trouble.”
Her fellow directors were chair Helen Coonan and Jane Halton. They banded together to pursue reform and set the Crown ship on a new course.
“I felt it was in my wheelhouse what the business needed. It needed a change in operating model and organisational structure. It needed a turnaround strategy, better leadership, better talent and a change in culture,” Korsanos says.
As she was a cleanskin director, she survived unscathed from the inquiries by the NSW, Victorian and WA gaming regulators into Crown, which she quips “were not fun”.
The night she returned home from her Melbourne grilling, which she did via video link from Sydney, her son joked: “Mum, I think you’ve just finished the HSC!”
The NSW inquiry, in fact, described Korsanos as an asset to the Crown board.
“By the time I retired, we had a well formulated reform agenda. Contrary to what the media was saying, it was very well progressed, particularly in the areas of anti-money laundering (AML) and compliance. We had an almost completely newly minted executive leadership team,” she says.
Coonan, who stepped up to be Crown chair in early 2020 after being on the board for many years, was criticised by the Victorian inquiry. Korsanos believes her treatment was “unfair”.
“Because she gave it her all,” she declares, when I ask why.
“She did everything to repair Crown. There was never a deliberate holding back of information. Even between the New South Wales and the Victorian inquiries, we found more. That information was disclosed because we found it. We kept pushing.”
Korsanos had conducted extensive due diligence, even talking to financial crimes regulator Austrac, before she took up her Crown role.
She did not see any blazing red warning lights even though Crown staff had been detained in China in October 2016 for alleged gambling crimes.
“But things don’t always look the way they seem. I think I’m much stronger at assessing risk today,” she says.
“I do what I call the loopback test when we make decisions as a board. I think ‘If I didn’t know this business, and I’m not in the business and I’m not thinking the way I think, how would somebody else think? What am I missing?’
“So it’s not what you read, it’s what’s not on the page. It’s the discussions you’re not having. Can I bring something else to the table to help management think differently?”
She believes she has missed out on some corporate opportunities because of her time at Crown. But so be it.
What most frustrates her now is the uninformed, especially in academia, who postulate about the Crown affair without bothering to do their research.
“I know there are certain case studies that have been written on Crown and none of us were asked for input,” she bristles.
“If you are going to get it right and you are going to teach people something about what happened, the people who were at the coalface are the most important.”
Focus on what you can control
A constant in Korsanos’s life has been Jamie Odell.
They first met in February 2009 when Odell was Aristocrat’s chief executive designate but had not yet taken over. Korsanos was a senior executive.
“He was trying to understand the business and I remember us having just a frank conversation on what I thought was wrong, and what needed to be done,” she recalls.
In July that year Odell appointed Korsanos, who had previously worked at food groups Kellogg’s and Goodman Fielder as CFO. She jokes that his decision “took too long”.
For the next eight years they worked to turn around Aristocrat’s operations and make it one of the best performing stocks on the ASX.
Their association now continues at Light & Wonder, where Odell is executive chairman, and at the Ashok Jacob-chaired Ellerston Capital, where they were founders of its top performing JAADE private assets fund run by David Leslie – and are now on boards of its investee companies.
Korsanos says the most important thing Odell has taught her in business and life is to stay calm and focus on what you can control. She believes she has taught him the power of prioritisation.
“Jamie is not a patient guy. Neither am I. But I can methodically plan out priorities and investment,” she says.
“We’ve built a high level of trust for each other. We’ve got complementary skills, have probably got the same level of energy levels and share the same values.
“Being in the trenches together, even at the worst of times, we could find ways to laugh at ourselves. I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. When you combine our complementary skills and values, I think we are stronger together.”
Odell says he has always admired Korsanos’s passion, energy and determination.
“She always gives 100 per cent and has a remarkable quality to inspire people to be successful, drive great outcomes and importantly to have fun, even in high pressure environments,” he says.
He was one of the very few that knew of her breast cancer diagnosis. Even in their darkest days together, Korsanos never told Coonan and Halton of her private battle.
“I’ll never forget the day Toni called me to tell me her sad news; we were due to fly to the US the following day. She faced her treatment with courage and she has subsequently used her experience to help others,” Odell says.
“During her treatment I did my best to provide her with support and encouragement, and always focus on positive outcomes. I am incredibly proud of all she has achieved to date and have no doubt she will continue to be successful in all aspects of her life.”
In August 2021 Korsanos walked 250km in 31 days to raise money for the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse.
She and Angelo are now funding an interactive oncology support program at Chris O’Brien, where 20 women are following her example of exercise and diet in their cancer treatment.
“The latest program update I received reduced me to tears. The women participating in the program are getting stronger and the practitioners are seeing and believing in the benefits,” she says.
“It is important to me that my experience improves others’ experience. This is what I learnt from my cancer journey and am passionate about. I can make it better for others. Survivorship has given me that.”
Her cancer experience helped put her Crown trials into an empowering context and changed her outlook on life for the better, forever.
“Cancer is stress. Everything else is not. So I don’t care what gets thrown at me these days,” she says proudly.
“If it is not about health, if it is not about your family, if it is not about your friends, if it doesn’t impact your happiness, fix it. It is fixable.
“You can combat anything, it doesn’t matter. Solve the problem. Take a deep breath and go for it.”
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