60 Minutes saga: don’t hold your breath over Nine’s review
Executives at Nine who played a hand in 60 Minutes’ foray into the kidnapping in Lebanon needn’t be too worried about the “review” ordered by new boss Hugh Marks.
It’ll be old home week for the three investigators appointed by Marks to dig deep into the muck and work out exactly how Tara Brown and her crew ended up in Beirut as part of a botched attempt to snatch Sally Faulkner’s children and spirit them back to Oz.
David “Hurls” Hurley is a tabloid TV veteran, so entrenched at Nine that he was called upon in the early 2000s to be its chief spin doctor.
He knows well Nine’s news director Darren “Wickie” Wick, who was sent to Beirut to spearhead the mission to get Brown and her team home. In the mid-2000s he was Wicks’s boss when Hurley was chief of A Current Affair.
If “Wickie” was part of the management chain that approved the Faulkner operation how effective can old mate “Hurls” be in assessing events?
Heading the review is Gerald Stone, the inaugural executive producer of 60 Minutes, with the third member of the team being internal counsel Rachel Launders, an ex-Gilbert and Tobin partner who joined Nine in January last year.
Launders has plenty of background to go on with, having been on the internal committee that in the past fortnight has handled the Beirut crisis, as do Marks and Wickie.
Launders, who’s also company secretary, should have them all (and chair Peter “Cossie” Costello) on speed dial.
Slow-track headhunt
It’s been a month since Elmer Funke Kupper walked out the door of the stock exchange amid bribery allegations at his old employer Tabcorp.
In lieu of an actual ASX boss, chair Rick Holliday-Smith has carved up and delegated day-to-day operations to deputy CEO Peter Hiom and general counsel Amanda Harkness.
That frees up Holliday-Smith to concentrate on finding a permanent fit for the top office, but the only problem is, he can’t decide who to appoint to undertake his executive search.
If it takes a month to find the headhunter, how long will it take to find the talent?
Speak up, says Narev
Fresh from his early morning touch up on the line from PM Malcolm Turnbull, CBA head teller Ian Narev brushed himself off for a lunch appearance at James Packer’s Crown.
Narev revealed he’d been busy corresponding with victims of the bank’s insurance scandal, although sadly the busy banker hasn’t yet found time in the diary to deliver on his promise to sit face-to-face with them.
It’ll happen, it’s just a matter of when, Narev insists.
He’s adamant CBA hasn’t victimised the whistleblowers at the centre of two of the bank’s scandals, with Jeff Morris (financial planning) and Benjamin Koh (CommInsure) bulleted for unrelated reasons.
While the pair may have found the exit door, Narev insists his door is open to anyone who wants to share. “We need them to speak up if we’re running an ethical organisation,” the Kiwi former child actor, who now gets $8.3 million a year, said.
Joining him on the top table for the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce lunch were Packer’s fave venture capitalist, Paul Bassat of Square Peg, retail royalty Marc Besen, Goldies chairman Terry Campbell, Spotless chairman Margaret Jackson and mining legend Hugh Morgan.
Also among the throng: PPB boss Ian Carson, Credit Suisse heavy Michael Naphtali, builders Louis, Luciano and Nicolas Crema and a clutch of property developers — Benni Aroni (of Eureka and Australia 108 fame), Sam Tarascio (Salta) and Blues president Mark Loguiduice of Crawfords.
Enough is enough
Is this the end for the man they call “Mr Clancy”?
He travels from AGM to AGM around Australia to hurl defamatory and baseless abuse at Michael Chaney.
Chaney has generally endured the abuse until Mr Clancy runs out of puff, resisting calls from other shareholders to shut him up, because he doesn’t want to deprive investors of the right to speak.
But at the Woodside AGM yesterday, Chaney reached the end of his tether. He declared he had received advice that he could take out a restraining order which would stop Mr Clancy attending other Chaney AGMs, and urged Mr Clancy to get professional help.
Then a still-ranting Mr Clancy was dragged away by two burly security guards.
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