NSW gaming inquiry: Crown director Ben Brazil ‘thumped table’ over China arrests

Crown director Ben Brazil ‘thumped the table’ to get the board to hold a post-mortem on the arrest of 19 employees in China, inquiry told.

Ben Brazil giving evidence via video link at the NSW casino inquiry.

Crown Resorts director Ben Brazil “thumped the table” to get the board to hold a post-mortem on the arrest of 19 Crown employees in China in 2016, the NSW casino inquiry has been told.

Giving evidence to the inquiry by video link from London, Mr Brazil, a former senior executive with Macquarie Group, said he was concerned to find out what happened in the lead-up to their arrest in October 2016 and whether the board had been “culpable”.

But he said his call for an investigation into the events leading up to the arrests, including an examination of the emails of the staff who were arrested, met with some resistance from other members of the board, who said it was not appropriate while the staffers were in still in jail.

Mr Brazil, who was a director of Crown from June 2009 until April 2017 and a former employee of Mr Packer’s Consolidated Press, told the inquiry that he had been “in the dark” about the circumstances leading up to the arrests despite being a long-time board member.

He was not even sure, until he learned of the arrests, whether Crown had staff at the time permanently employed in China.  Crown’s former head of VIP operations, Melbourne-based Jason O’Connor, who was visiting China at the time, and 18 other Crown staffers based in China were arrested for breaking Chinese laws that ban the solicitation of gambling in the country.

Mr O’Connor served 10 months in jail in Shanghai before being released, with most other staffers serving a similar time.

Mr Brazil said he and Mr Packer had also had a discussion in March 2017 about “hypothetical scenarios” around privatisation of Crown Resorts at the time of the arrests and whether this could “be of assistance in the resolution of the China detention problems”.

But he said there was no action on the discussions, which were only at a very “theoretical” stage and did not go ahead.

Mr Brazil said at the first board meeting following the China arrests he strongly pressed his case for a full post-mortem into the events leading up to the arrests, going beyond the activities of the people who were arrested.

“I asked at the first board meeting which occurred after the arrests whether we had worked out if we were culpable,” he said.

“I was asked by (Crown chairman Robert) Rankin what I meant by ‘culpable’.

“I responded that this is a pretty specific word.

“Discussion ensued about whether it was in good taste to be going through and interrogating the past practice and past conduct of employees who were, at that point, paying a high price themselves.

“I was not asking, at that point, about the limited subset of people who had been detained.

“I was asking about the potential culpability of a much broader set of people.

“I responded that, at this early stage, the idea was that you treated all those things as one and the same until you knew better.

“It was very important we get to the bottom of it and, in particular, work out whether some of us had caused this tragic event.”

He said he believed that this should have included an examination of the emails of the staff who had been arrested.

“It does no service to someone in prison to put them on a pedestal of assumed innocence,” he said.

Mr Brazil said he was told by Mr Rankin that law firm Minter Ellison would be conducting the post-mortem investigation.

“Over following months I asked for updates on the state of the post-mortem,” he said.

Mr Brazil said he had already decided to resign as a director of Crown before the arrests of the staff in China because of the time pressures involved in his work as a senior executive of Macquarie.

The inquiry was told that Minter Ellison representative Richard Murphy had made a presentation to the Crown Resorts board at its February 2017 meeting on what the firm had discovered by that point. But further reference to his comments to the board meeting was suppressed given the fact that a class action is currently under way.

Mr Brazil said at his final board meeting in early 2017 he believed that an investigation was “on track” but there was “more thumping of the table required” to ensure that the investigation remained on track.

Mr Brazil, who was a full-time executive of Macquarie while also an independent director of Crown, said his time as a director of Crown took up one to two days a month, including attending board meetings, with an additional day or so in his role as chairman of its audit and corporate governance committee.

He said while he was a director of Crown he had never heard of Crown subsidiaries called Southbank and Riverbank, which the inquiry has been told could have been used to facilitate money laundering. In answer to questioning, Mr Brazil said he had no idea of the reasons behind Mr Packer’s resignation from the Crown board in 2015, despite his long association with Mr Packer.

Mr Packer had earlier told the inquiry that he resigned from the board because he was sick, including having bipolar disorder.

But Mr Brazil said he had no idea at the time that Mr Packer announced his decision to leave the board that he was not well or had mental health problems.

He said he had sought a presentation on Crown’s VIP businesses in December 2012 because there was a “risk of not achieving (its) profits”.

But he said that when the news broke of the arrests of Crown’s staff in China four years later, he had no specifically knowledge that Crown had staff permanently based in the country at the time.

He insisted that he could still be considered an independent director of Crown despite his long- term relationship with Mr Packer, whom has described him as a friend.

He told the inquiry that Mr Packer had offered him concert tickets for his then girlfriend Mariah Carey, but he did not take up the offer.