Chris Wharton tipped as WA’s next agent-general in UK

Illustration: Rod Clement

Small town Chinese whispers have gripped the wild west that is Perth, especially when it comes to billionaire Kerry Stokes’s Seven West Media and its former controversial boss Chris Wharton.

The latest is that Sydney-born Wharton, who turns 60 this year, is preparing to head to London to replace former Freehills partner John Aitkins as WA Agent-General when his two-year term ends in September.

The prestigious role would make Wharton — who presided over turbulent recent times at Seven — WA’s new representative in Europe serving Mark McGowan’s just-elected Labor government. Seven’s West Australian newspaper proudly endorsed McGowan ahead of the March 11 vote.

Although nothing’s ever so simple with Wharton. A source close to the 20-year Seven veteran said — rather than relocating to Britain to promote trade and investment in WA — Wharton planned to stay in Perth and was fielding offers of non-executive directorships to complement his seat on chairman Russell Gibbs’s West Coast Eagles board and as a trustee of Stokes’s beloved Telethon.

We’ll see. Wharton famously went on “long service leave” at the end of last year, after which Stokes installed EY audit partner Philip Teale as interim boss and also brought in former iiNet exec Maryna Fewster to run a fine-tooth comb through the media empire’s western domain.

Fewster was brought in on the recommendation of iiNet founder Michael Malone, who is on Stokes’s Seven West board. She is a leading candidate to take the top job in Perth permanently.

On the same day Wharton went on his leave, his chief financial officer Mark Shelton left the group, while Wharton said reports he wouldn’t return were “horseshit”.

Nonetheless, the Perth rumour mill went into overdrive. One whisper said the rotund Wharton’s time off was to have lap band surgery.

Actually, the exec went to Lapland, the winter wonderland in far north Finland for Christmas. These things can take on a life of their own. While lap band surgery was off the mark, Wharton’s departure wasn’t, as Stokes made official a fortnight ago. To send Wharton off, Stokes attended a farewell morning tea in Wharton’s old office and presented the exiting chief with a Montblanc pen and Montblanc cufflinks.

Perfect for an Aussie in Europe, one might think. Although a box of cigars would have been apt.

Glenn Druery, the preference whisperer. Picture: Renee Nowytarger

Preference whisperer

We touched on some combustible dynamics on the Canberra Senate crossbench in yesterday’s column.

Former Derryn Hinch staffer John Clements has engaged lawyers and lodged a formal workplace complaint against the Senate office of “the Human Headline”. The matter — which is now in the hands of Rosemary Huxtable’s finance department — concerns differing accounts of Clements’s departure from Hinch’s office.

Whatever the reasons, Malcolm Turnbull’s PMO was happy to see the back of Clements, which it found a difficult negotiator.

The government seems to much prefer Glenn Druery (aka “the Preference Whisperer”), who remains a Hinch adviser.

But not everyone is a fan. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation apparently can’t stand Druery. The recent WA election didn’t help.

Druery helped co-ordinate a micro-party preference deal that got the Liberal Democrats candidate into the WA upper house. We understand that earned Druery a $30,000 success fee.

It also earned the anger of One Nation, which only got two upper house seats, an underwhelming result after all the hype.

The Li show

Tonight Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is off to watch the Andrew Pridham-chaired Sydney Swans from the GWS Giants chairman Tony Shepherd’s SCG Trust box. Good luck translating that tangle of loyalties to our powerful guest.

Prime Minister (and Swans fan) Malcolm Turnbull is also expected to be along. Will Swans board member (and Seven West CEO) Tim Worner also join the party?

Yesterday, the Li show moved from Parliament House in Canberra to Sydney’s Westin where much of the country’s business elite fawned over one of the key figures in Australia’s biggest customer.

Along to pay respects were former Victorian premier John Brumby (now a director of the Australian board of Chinese telco Huawei), Macquarie Group boss Nicholas Moore (whose investment bank is well versed in Middle Kingdom capital), Business Council of Australia president Grant King (taking a break from putting the heat on crossbench senators), former trade minister Andrew Robb (a consultant to Landbridge Group, the Chinese company that upset the Yanks when it bought Darwin Port), Blackmores boss Christine Holgate (whose vitamin stock shot up more than 19 per cent this week, following news over a favourable rule change in China), and Westpac boss Brian Hartzer and the head of his institutional bank Lyn Cobley, attempting to tilt the banking ledger after the ANZ’s hydra-headed charm offensive in Canberra on Thursday.

Leighton trial

After a gathering at Sydney’s Downing Centre yesterday, a trial date has been set for the corporate watchdog ASIC’s case against former Leighton Holdings executives Peter Gregg and Russell Waugh.

The joint trial — which concerns the alleged falsifying of company documents at Leighton in 2011 — will start on November 27, which we gather will get in the way of a cruise holiday Waugh and his wife had planned, and paid for, before he was served notice. It is expected to run for up to three weeks.

That timeline gives Primary Health Care chairman Robert Ferguson and his recruiters at Egon Zehnder another eight months to lock in Gregg’s successor at the listed medical outfit. Gregg resigned from his gig as Primary Health Care boss in mid-January as a result of the case, but continues to act in the role.

The ASX’s private health operators are keeping Egon Zehnder busy, as our wise colleague John Durie noted this week.

Ramsay Health Care’s Chris Rex announced in February he would leave once his chairman Michael Siddle finds a replacement, while Healthscope boss Robert Cooke has flagged to his chair Paula Dwyer that she should begin looking for her next CEO.

As they say in the health business, no one lives forever.