David Murray tapped for AMP board role

David Murray.

Here’s an exciting AMP board development: word is David Murray has been approached to join Mike Wilkins’ board.

Australian business figures don’t get much more different from Catherine Brenner than the 69-year-old Murray, a former chief executive of Commonwealth Bank from 1992 to 2005, a less scandalous iteration of its history.

There’s no question Murray has finance executive chops.

And the former Future Fund chairman’s lack of chumminess with Australia’s director class is legendary.

Margin Call understands Murray has been approached by Wilkins, a relatively young 60, to join the recently pummelled now $12 billion group, whose shares yesterday closed up for a third consecutive day after The Fall of Brenner.

Wilkins is also on the hunt for a non-executive director to fill Brenner’s spot. That recruiting assignment could blow out.

Three AMP directors are asking appalled shareholders to keep their spots at next week’s annual meeting: Auckland lawyer Andrew Harmos, consultant Van­essa Wallace and retailer Holly Kramer.

If AMP’s May 10 AGM is the bloodbath many are forecasting, interim executive chairman Wilkins could be on the hunt for up to four new directors, not to mention a new chief executive to replace the comprehensively executed former CEO Craig Meller.

We’ll wait and see if Murray is one of the cast of AMP’s next act. Last night neither Murray nor AMP would comment.

But if Murray is, expect him to have firm ideas about the wealth and insurance group’s next chairman.

Come to think of it, what’s the name of that guy who ran Joe Hockey’s Financial System Inquiry? He’d be good.

Bee in BCA’s bonnet

Labor’s new high-profile senator Kristina Keneally has achieved the impossible. She has some members of Jennifer Westacott’s Business Council of Australia wishing her predecessor Sam Dastyari was back in Canberra’s red house.

That’s an outcome we thought about as likely as the Australian Financial Review admitting, whatever his dumpling predilections, Dasher was right about the banking royal commission.

The BCA’s “Bring Back Dasher!” movement began on Tuesday morning after an extraordinary spray by Keneally on Twitter that demonstrated the former NSW premier’s ASIC company search skills.

She published a document outlining the directors of Centre Ground Limited, a newly established BCA-owned but not BCA-branded campaigning company, whose usefulness to the sales effort for the Turnbull government’s $65bn business tax cut would appear to be highly questionable.

Keneally’s tweet also demonstrated the gloves are off in the union-backed Labor campaign against the BCA and, in particular, Andrew Bragg, Westacott’s new campaign lieutenant, a former acting Liberal federal director and, as of Tuesday, an enraged Centre Ground director who had his — and his young family’s — home address sprayed all over the graffiti wall that is Jack Dorsey’s Twitter.

By yesterday afternoon the former Sky News host back-pedalled from her cavalier approach.

“Of course I don’t want Mr Bragg’s personal information compromised,” Keneally told Margin Call. “I’m sorry if it caused Mr Bragg any distress.”

About three hours after Keneally published Bragg’s home address, the offending tweet was deleted and a new redacted version of the Centre Ground company document was published.

That was after the BCA contacted the senator’s office, as well as the office of her new boss Bill Shorten.

And it was after the original Twitter bomb had been retweeted more than 40 times, exploding among Keneally’s almost 70,000 followers and army of fellow travellers.

Cleaning up that mess from Dorsey’s social media giant — should his local minions go ahead with it — will now involve a tedious and expensive legal exchange between the BCA and Twitter, which we gather the big business lobby has been trying to sign up as a member.

Illustration: Rod Clement

Wedding bells

For dedicated readers who have ridden the AMP fees-for-no-service rollercoaster with us over recent, heavy-going weeks, finally some happy news.

One of Western Australia’s most influential and wealthy businesswomen, Janet Holmes a Court, 74, last weekend got hitched in Tasmania.

The philanthropist and art collector has married younger man, Perth mining businessman Gilbert George, a boyish 67, with whom she has been stepping out for several years.

Holmes a Court’s nuptials come almost 30 years after the death from a heart attack of her billionaire husband Robert Holmes a Court in 1990. He
was 53.

Janet Holmes a Court and Gilbert George tie the knot, with Brian Tairaku Ritchie officiating.

In a surprising twist, officiating at the ceremony was Brian Tairaku Ritchie, the now Hobart-based co-founder and bass guitarist of 80s and 90s American folk punk band Violent Femmes (of “Blister in the Sun” fame).

Ritchie, along with wife Varuni Kulasekera, are Aussie citizens. The musician continues his music career, but moonlights as curator of the annual MONA Foma festival, which runs for almost two weeks in January in Hobart (but which next year will move to Launceston as MONA’s David Walsh builds a hotel at the museum).

Holmes a Court has collaborated with Ritchie’s festival via her Janet Holmes a Court Art Collection. The relationship seems cemented going by his presence front and centre at last week’s ceremony.

Holmes a Court, fond of her privacy, didn’t return Margin Call’s inquiries.

We are told the bride, who carried a large bouquet of Australian native flowers, made her own avant-garde dress. And wasn’t it something?