‘Amazing’ Mohl’s AMP chair miss wasn’t a man thing

Andrew Mohl back in 2002 when he served as AMP CEO.

After the fall of Catherine Brenner, the pale, male and stale brigade is on the war path to recapture crumbling AMP castle and what remains of its boardroom treasure.

Storming the barricades is AMP’s former chief executive Andrew Mohl, 62. Or have the supposed “top corporate figures” (all anonymous) rewriting history on his behalf just got a bit excited off their own bat?

Today’s instalment on the front of The Financial Review sure reads like Mohl’s campaign launch for the $660,000-a-year chairmanship at the now $12 billion wealth and insurance giant.

The report came the day after the masthead, quite rightly, roasted David Turner’s retiree CBA board, of which Mohl is a 10-year veteran.

According to today’s report, Mohl volunteered his services as chairman to AMP in mid-2016, before then interim chair John Palmer appointed Brenner to replace the exited Simon McKeon.

According to The Fin, the failure to gift Mohl, one of CBA’s apparently comatose directors, the plum gig was a “disastrous decision”.

Margin Call can reveal that while Mohl was in the running for the chairmanship, after he volunteered himself, he was on a list of five.

Mohl, by that time eight years into his CBA retirement gig, didn’t even make the final two.

According to The Fin, Mohl missed out to Brenner because she was a woman.

Sources close to the “amazing” Mohl might see it that way, but it’s not how those in the succession process remember it.

“It was a decision absolutely not made on gender,” one boardroom insider told Margin Call.

As our respected colleague John Durie reported long ago, existing AMP director and former Aviva boss Trevor Matthews, was outgoing chair McKeon’s preferred candidate to take over from him.

Matthews, who is still on the board of the financial services group, was also on Palmer’s list. Also above Mohl.

Let’s be clear, male, female or otherwise, chairing the faction riven AMP board after the McKeon coup was never going to be an easy task, as Pamela Williams’s authoritative piece made clear in The Weekend Australian (before it was hoovered up and republished without attribution elsewhere).

Brenner — out of her depth, evidently — was left to corral a divided and inexperienced board, as the business struggled to find its way under boss Craig Meller.

This failure has had many fathers, mothers and consultants over AMP’s many lumbering decades.

Revisionism that all the outfit needed was a shot of Mohl — a member of the CBA board this week damned by APRA as complacent, overconfident and insular — is highly questionable.

Read the full Margin Call column tomorrow in print and online.