Amber Harrison pulls plug on Seven West Media deal

Illustration: Rod Clement.

Pity Supreme Court Justice John Sackar who on Monday will have to attempt to keep a straight face while adjudicating on the Seven West Media-Amber Harrison legal circus.

Yesterday, Harrison surprised Kerry Stokes’s Seven West Media by pulling out of an almost agreed settlement.

As flagged in this column yesterday, the settlement would have given a $50,000 payment to Harrison’s lawyers at Patron Legal.

We understand Patron’s Shane Wescott and the team were going to waive that fee and — without Seven’s knowledge — give the payment to Harrison.

The team at Seven — and the board watching over them — seemed to think it was a done deal.

But in the end Harrison decided that after a three-year legal fight with the company, the last seven months of which have been shockingly public, she could not put her name to anything that could be characterised as an apology to the network.

“I couldn’t give Seven the opportunity to shop this out as, ‘We were right, she was wrong’,” she told Margin Call yesterday.

As well as abandoning the settlement, Harrison has folded all her legal action against the company.

Yesterday she wrote to the Supreme Court to inform Justice Sackar that she will accept its orders on Monday, including the sweeping gag order Seven has imposed on her.

Harrison also informed the court that neither she nor any lawyer representing her would attend. Earlier in the day she stood down her lawyers at ­Patron Legal and barrister ­Julian Burnside.

The decision is a risky one. It could expose Harrison — who was an executive assistant at Seven until she left in 2014 after her relationship with chief executive Tim Worner became known in the company — to Seven’s legal costs for the ­Supreme Court case.

“I’m fully expecting I’ll be pursued for costs,” Harrison told us. “I decided that being pursued for a million dollars of costs was better than putting my name to an apology I don’t believe in.”

Not wanting to disturb the court, Seven wouldn’t comment on costs. But people in the industry think it is unlikely to pursue them.

Onlookers of the case estimate it has cost the network well over $1 million, although that has never been disclosed.

If Harrison was ordered to pay them it would probably send the unemployed secretary into bankruptcy, surely a line even the Seven West board doesn’t want to cross. What a mess.

Blondes have more fun

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson will be Australian-bound in less than three weeks to deliver this year’s Lowy Lecture in Sydney. Good get.

Confirmation of the shaggy blond Johnson’s attendance at Australia’s marquee foreign policy event had been held up first by negotiations following British Prime Minister Theresa May’s narrow election win last month and then the subsequent Brexit talks with Jean-Claude Juncker’s emboldened European Union.

While still to be confirmed, it is expected that the Australia-United Kingdom Ministerial meeting (or AUKMIN, to use the parlance of Frances Adamson’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) will also take place at the end of July.

Boris Johnson gets a helping hand from Julie Bishop.

Those meetings will involve Johnson and his Australian counterpart, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, and Defence Minister Marise Payne and her UK offsider Michael Fallon.

Johnson’s Lowy Lecture — put on by Westfield shopping centre billionaire Frank Lowy’s distinguished foreign policy think tank — will be given at an undisclosed location in Sydney’s CBD on July 27.

The last Lowy Lecture was given by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

The three before that were by recent Liberal Party federal council speaker David Petraeus (better known to many as the former CIA boss who had an affair with his biographer), Germany’s indomitable chancellor Angela Merkel, and the Australian export who founded this masthead, Rupert Murdoch.

Johnson knows Australia well, having taught as a gap year teacher at Geelong Grammar when he was 19 and, in the early 1990s, returning as a guest lecturer in European thought at Monash University.

He also has had a longstanding relationship with Australian political exports Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor, who first worked with Johnson on his tilt for the London mayoralty in 2008.

Up, up and away

There’s plenty of intrigue around John Borghetti’s Virgin Australia at the moment.

Over in the Middle Kingdom, Virgin Australia’s Chinese shareholder HNA Group is one of four giant conglomerates under scrutiny by the local regulator over its outbound investments.

What will become of the Chinese regulator’s usual interest in billionaire Chen Feng’s empires remains as unclear as the outcome of the Communist Party’s upcoming 19th National Congress.

Also causing some intrigue is last week’s departure of Virgin Australia’s CEO-in-waiting John Thomas, who left well under a year into his role as the boss of the airline’s domestic and international business.

Former Virgin Australia CEO-in-waiting John Thomas.

There were rumours that Thomas’s swift departure — in which chair Elizabeth Bryan took a keen interest — was such a surprise that the former aviation consultant had just settled on a house the day before he was dumped.

That’s not true.

In fact, Thomas settled on his elegant Mosman pile for $5.5m in mid-May, a whole six weeks earlier.

Here’s hoping his exit terms were all right.