David Williams faces scrutiny over PolyNovo share gift to US doctor

PolyNovo chair David Williams in his Melbourne office. Picture: Ian Currie

David Williams tried to appear contrite a few weeks ago after buying shares in RateMyAgent, a listed real estate website, while it was still in a blackout period. Williams chairs the company, so he should have known more than anyone that trading wasn’t allowed at the time.

And he owned up to the error. He told the market it was all a mistake, a very harmless one. “The trade was an inadvertent oversight and of a small amount,” he said. Happens to us all, right? No need for excessive judgment.

But, hang on. That was actually the second time this year that Williams, sitting on the board of a company, had traded shares during a blackout period. In January, he sold $1500 worth of biotech PolyNovo. Except he didn’t admit to that error at all. No contrition. And he should’ve shown contrition, ­because he chairs that company, too.

Instead, Williams issued a strange explanation that the shares were actually sold as a “wedding present” to a “close doctor friend” working at Vanderbilt University Medical Centre in the US.

Which is just about the most peculiar wedding gift we’ve ever heard of. You’d sooner buy a 49-piece dinner set, or an espresso machine, than gift a parcel of shares and attract the corporate hassle of a 3Y notice, or suffer the glare of suspicion arising from the curiosity of this lark.

PolyNovo chairman David Williams has a history of trading shares during blackouts.

Whatever Williams was thinking, we’ve dug a bit deeper and discovered that Vanderbilt is supplied by PolyNovo with Novosorb BTM, the biotech’s signature wound treatment. Williams’ doctor friend in all likelihood uses Novosorb and is now the proud owner of a small chunk of the company, as well, gifted by the chair himself. We put questions about this to Williams, but he didn’t reply to any of them.

The Americans take physician transparency seriously enough to have created a law in 2010 mandating that payments to doctors be disclosed in a transparency database. It’s called the Sunshine Act.

Williams wouldn’t tell us if he declared his wedding present under the Sunshine Act, but whether he has or hasn’t, the gift is likely to be in breach of Vanderbilt’s code of conduct, which caps their value (the gifts) at $452. It doesn’t appear to allow doctors to receive shares as a present, either, particularly from companies supplying products to the hospital. Because that might be a conflict.

But that’s Williams, always involved in a lark. If he calls a team member named Ahmed a “terrorist” in front of the board, well, that’s all in good fun.

And when he flouts the listing rules on blackout trading, that’s just an oversight.

And if he bends the truth a bit, that’s no big deal either. In March he told us there was no “report” and “no investigation” commissioned by PolyNovo’s board into his conduct as chair, when actually there was an investigation, led by actual people who delivered actual findings calling for him to step down.

And Williams agreed to do it, too; a search was conducted for his replacement.

But those plans mysteriously fell apart in the months that followed, and since then PolyNovo has lost most of its management: the CEO, the general counsel, its chief science officer and, last month, its VP for quality assurance. But not Williams. He’s up for re-election at the AGM.

Scratch that

It’s not often that Margin Call gets to the bottom of a mystery that’s been afflicting our hardworking public servants for years, but at last we can lift the lid on the case of the scratchy Canberra bog roll.

How do you solve a persistent problem of blocked up toilets in the men’s lavatories?

Plumbers are expensive in the nation’s capital, but the good folk at the Health Department – always thinking of the Treasurer’s bottom line – ultimately settled for a cheaper solution.

The revelation comes courtesy of one of the more bizarre freedom of information requests we’ve seen in our long career of trawling the rump-end of our nation’s capital.

An email trail made public by the Health department, in response, outlines the problem succinctly: an “ongoing issue with a staff member blocking the toilets regularly” in the men’s loo on the fourth level of the department’s headquarters in the ­Canberra suburb of Woden.

The solution? Could they perhaps replace the current bog roll with “very low-ply toilet paper” for a while, and see if that helped?

Of course, any change to supply arrangements in the public service requires a bit of extra paperwork, but would they need to get a quote for the alternative?

Happily, the answer was that the cheap scratchy stuff is cheaper, so additional work would not be required. But they’d have to work through the two and a half pallets of the old stuff that had already been delivered to the office – likely to take about three weeks, according to the supply section.

So, mystery solved for any public servants wondering why the dunny paper at the Health department took a sudden dive, back in the day. But it doesn’t really help solve the real conundrum, as Margin Call sees it.

You see, all of this happened back in 2017. But the FOI request was only lodged a month ago. Who on earth would care about this stuff some eight years after the event? Or is there some as-yet unrevealed scandal surrounding the department’s recent forays into toilet paper acquisition that the unnamed investigator was chasing?

Sadly, the department couldn’t supply Margin Call with much in the way of clarification, although a spokesman said it wasn’t aware of any concerns around its toilet paper purchasing. The building, they confirmed, is still getting stocked with the sub-ply dunny roll.

Our best guess, then, is that the FOI was lodged by some former employee of the department, probably just for shits and giggles.

The Sirius Building in Woden Town Centre, Canberra.

Mind you, it’s not the only controversy to engulf the Health Department’s Woden office, after it last year changed the name from the Sirius building — named for HMS Sirius, the flagship of the First Fleet — to the Yaradhang Building, to help promote the department as an “accessible and inclusive workplace”.

The brief outrage attracted comment from former Prime Minister John Howard, and spawned a mammoth 296 page FOI disclosure of its own, detailing the deliberations that led to the decision.

And within that was the answer to yet another mystery. What happened to the model of the HMS Sirius that was originally on display in the building’s foyer? After some scuttling about, department officials discovered they’d lent it to the Department of Defence, who’d never bothered to return it.

Sirius or Yaradhang, it’s a building of mystery and secrets.

INSIDE MARGIN CALL

Getting to the bottom
of a scratchy mystery