Openmarkets copped a $4.5m fine from the corporate regulator last week over its suspicious trades and compliance failures. That’s the largest penalty ever imposed by ASIC’s Markets Disciplinary Panel, and it includes a three-year ban on the firm’s former acting head of trading, Virginia Owczarek, named as the bad egg in all this mess.
But we’re not here to talk about her, nor Openmarkets’ prior misdeeds of years gone by. Those with an interest in this matter will have noticed a peculiar absence of any commentary from Openmarkets’ newly anointed CEO, Dan Jowett.
It’s not because he’s meek – it’s because he’s been in Hawaii with the family, posting happy snaps on Facebook, as any sensible leader would do when their firm’s reputation is being thoroughly trashed back home.
“Sunnier than Sydney ha!” wrote Jowett from Waikiki a few days before the fine was announced. It’s a practical certainty that he would have been given advance notice of the pain to come. Even if he wasn’t, there were more high-watt smiles and apricot sunsets that needed to be uploaded to his social accounts in the days after the fine was meted out.
Away from the resort island, the company was scrambling to put together lines saying it would absorb the penalty, and had effectively revamped practices and ditched the liability of the retail broking business at the centre of the drama.
Jowett declined to comment, referring Margin Call to the company’s statement. But he did confirm he’s back in Sydney.
Sympli slims down
Speaking of Sympli, whom we wrote about at considerable length on Tuesday, it would appear the upstart firm fighting a war over the extremely sexy and talked-about territory of e-conveyancing has hit the skids of late.
Margin Call has heard of significant lay-offs at the company, with around 50 people let go in recent weeks. Sympli’s pool of workers wouldn’t be any higher than 200 employees, so we’re talking about a quarter of its workforce.
Sympli declined to make any remarks on the employees (didn’t deny the numbers either) but sank the boot into arch rival PEXA over its monopoly rule of the hotly contested market.
It blamed PEXA for deliberately slowing down market reforms and engaging in anti-competitive behaviour that’s starving Sympli of revenue. Hence, the lay-offs.
As reported, Sympli’s CEO, Philip Joyce, has had no shortage of influential backers to prosecute the PEXA villain narrative.
His greatest sponsor has been former NSW customer service minister Victor Dominello, whose office looped-in Joyce on internal emails, jointly managed negative press about PEXA, indulged his talking points, special favours, and generally gave Joyce unusual amounts of special treatment.
Dominello left NSW politics at the March election and for some reason is calling himself a part-time professor at UNSW on his LinkedIn profile. That’s news to us.
As far as Margin Call is aware, Dominello was appointed the director of the Trustworthy Digital Society Hub, a joint initiative between UNSW and the University of Technology, Sydney that was announced in April.
Quite a delta between that role and a university prof. We asked Dominello to explain, but he didn’t reply.
Whitlam on the move
It was only in December that we regaled you all with the story of headhunter Anna Whitlam and the terrible time she was having keeping staff.
Whitlam sold her business to CEO advisory firm Teneo in August, receiving cash for the sale and an impressive APAC title.
Weirdly, the people she’d been hiring, either at Teneo or at her own outfit – AWPeople – seemed to check out within months of signing up, and sometimes even within weeks.
And now even Whitlam herself is on the move, announcing her departure from Teneo on Tuesday with a cryptic message posted to LinkedIn.
“I’ve been fortunate to have some incredible people in my corner and I will miss them terribly,” she wrote. It suggests an opponent in the other corner, of course.
“I’m now going to take some time out to decide on my next exciting adventure,” she added. But maybe that’s just a polite way of pointing to a few wee restraints preventing her from making any sudden movements elsewhere in the market?
In any case, Whitlam ditching Teneo after a couple of years isn’t all that different to what John Hurst and Murray Williams did after their Quay Advisers was bought out in 2019. Hurst lasted at Teneo for just over a year, Williams a bit longer. Surely the Manhattan-based firm is starting to get bored of watching people take the money and run?
Flak farewelled
And finally a thinning out of the innumerable flaks recruited by PwC Australia to prevent itself from spontaneously combusting under the weight of rolling scandals.
The latest to leave is Alex Cramb, a long-term staffer in the office of Anthony Albanese. That was prior to his elevation to prime minister.
Cramb was brought in by PwC as a hired-gun on short-term strategic work. That’s wrapped up now that the guts of the firestorm’s dealt with.
We hear Cramb’s heading back to a day job of farm work on his Gippsland property, at least for the time being. Presumably he won’t have to witness as much hopeless slaughter there, either.
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