Crown keeping Blackstone on hold

Crown executive chair Helen Coonan. Picture: Adam Yip

Two weeks on and international private equity giant Blackstone is still waiting to hear from the Helen Coonan-led Crown ­Resorts board on its $8bn bid for the James Packer-controlled gambling house.

Blackstone, which is led in Australia by James Carnegie, sent its $11.85-a-share offer to Crown on March 21, but with so many balls in the air for Coonan we’ve yet to hear a peep from the executive chair, who is being assisted by her advisers from UBS led by Kelvin Barry.

Former pollie and lawyer Coonan, who has never run a listed company before, is trying to run a giant casino operation and deal with two royal commissions into its suitability to be a ­casino operator.

Crown’s submission to Ray Finkelstein’s Victorian royal commission is due on April 26, while the Neville Owen-led WA suitability inquiry is set to deliver its interim report by June 30 — that’s 12 weeks to go and hearings haven’t even started.

Sydney's Crown Casino at Barangaroo Picture: NCA NewsWire/Flavio Brancaleone

Blackstone, for the record, has no plan to participate in the royal commissions, but has already been in touch with regulators on its takeover bid.

Coonan is dealing with all this with just three other board members to call on for support: Jane Halton, Toni Korsanos and John Horvath, the latter of whom has said he wants to leave.

In contrast, Margin Call can reveal that Blackstone, where the deal team is being led by Carnegie and local head of real ­estate Chris Tynan, has been preparing for its Crown tilt as far back as September last year with the assistance of Richard Wagner from Morgan Stanley.

The choice of adviser for its scheme of arrangement makes sense with Tynan a former underling of Wagner’s as a managing director of the American bank’s real estate investing arm.

In September, Blackstone created two new Australian entities, SS Silver Pty Ltd and SS Silver II Pty Ltd, which are ultimately owned by a Singapore-based Blackstone holding company Sun Silver Holdings.

All roads lead to the Asian business hub, with Blackstone also using a freshly created Singapore entity, Midnight Acacia Holdings, to purchase its 9.9 per cent Crown stake that it bought from Melco for $8.15 a share almost a year ago.

All that might help explain why Blackstone, including via comments from Tynan, has been part of a recent campaign towards relaxing what it says are Australia’s restrictive foreign investment rules.

Its Crown offer via a Singapore-based parent will require FIRB approval.

The group has also some months ago applied to regulators for approval to increase its Crown stake beyond the almost 10 per cent it now has, but is believed to have no intention of involving itself in either the Victorian or WA suitability reviews. They will leave that to Coonan.

George’s ‘sick’ job

Newly appointed AMP CEO Alexis George.

There’s no doubt newly announced AMP boss Alexis George will be feeling sick in the stomach right about now.

At least, that’s what the ANZ deputy chief told The Australian’s The Deal magazine was part of her recipe for success in 2019: “You need to take roles that make you feel sick in the stomach,” she said.

After a slew of conduct breaches, ailing performance and the now mishandling of the group’s succession plans, there’s plenty at AMP to tie your stomach in knots.

Good thing the 57-year-old has negotiated quite the package for her arrival to fill the shoes of outgoing chief Francesco De Ferrari.

The Bega-born George, who self-describes as a mad NRL Sydney Roosters fan, scores a cash payment of $732,500 just for surviving her first six months, payable in December and perhaps a sign of the hard work to come with the Ares proposal still circling and AMP board in seeming disarray.

Following that, there’s also a $4.09m sign-on bonus to be delivered in AMP equity over three years and conditional on her continued employment (which judging by De Ferrari’s stint is easier said than done).

Illustration: Rod Clement.

That’s on top of a $1.7m base salary and potential to snag as much as $5.1m in incentives annually.

All considered, it’s a substantial boost given she took home a more moderate $2.2m package in her role under ANZ chief executive Shayne Elliott last financial year.

Perhaps time then to upgrade the family home, which she shares with husband Martin Barnes in Sydney’s leafy Lane Cove, nearby Hunters Hill perhaps more fitting for a top ASX chief executive.

Her appointment as chief executive sets the stage for a rare female chairman and management combination, alongside Debra Hazelton, which just like those events unfolding in the nation’s capital have come after intense scrutiny on their internal culture.

Recall it was the sex scandal involving then AMP Capital boss Boe Pahari that ultimately cost predecessor chair David Murray his job, the ructions of which no doubt contributed to George’s very elevation.

Only three years ago the group’s board faced scrutiny over a lack of female representation after the departure of Catherine Brennan and the rest of the female directors in the wake of the Hayne royal commission.

Just another issue to add to the new boss’s ever-growing to-do list — and she doesn’t even start until July 1.

Jabs blame game

Looks like there’s finally something Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and her southern counterpart Gladys Berejiklian can agree on.

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard. Picture: Damian Shaw

That its PM Scott Morrison to blame when it comes to the issues facing the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard told the press on Wednesday he was “as angry as I have ever been during the 15-month war with the virus”, drawing parallels to tanks and artillery being dropped on their doorstep just days before.

But, adding to Hazzard’s already extended analogy, just who is it that is drawing the government’s battle plan?

While Greg Hunt’s health department is no doubt the cog in the rollout, Margin Call notes that big four consulting firm PwC and its boss Tom Seymour are also in the mix — at the end of last year handed a lucrative contract as the department’s “program delivery partner”.

Details of just what’s involved in the partnership or any costings are slim, except that staff from the consulting firm have become entrenched in Canberra, with the cost of the project part of the $600m being spent on the vaccine delivery.

That covers logistics and administration, along with data and digital systems to support the oversight of the program — the latter the task for Accenture and its local head, Tara Brady.

Billionaire Lindsay Fox also gets a look-in with his Linfox, as well as local DHL boss Terry Ryan, both of whom are tasked with braving the floods and lockdowns to get the vaccines where they need to be.

As the blame game shifts from state, to federal, we wonder whether the private sector names will get a look-in too?