Deloitte’s style guru survives a bad cut

Illustration: Rod Clement

Richard Deutsch’sDeloitte has chopped 700 devoted staff, but one intriguing consultancy lingers.

“Nadia Benussi at times provides consulting services to Deloitte,” a spokesman confirmed to Margin Call.

Not precisely sure what style strategy Benussi dispenses, but she is best remembered for her days working with Hi 5, the cognitive movement children’s TV show. Other clients have included Kerri-Anne Kennerley and even Sex and the City star Kristin Davis.

She was there for Kevin Rudd’striumphant Kevin07 too, styling his photo shoots, fixing his hair and overseeing his clothing selection.

Depressed Deloitte staff are bemused Benussi remains within the Deloitte hierarchy, who’ve overseen the 700 cuts that represented about 7 per cent of its 10,000 workforce.

The staff mostly found out their redundancies after a high-noon virtual firm-wide meeting, which advised staff they would potentially receive a sameday calendar invite by 6pm for a ­confidential discussion should their job be among those gone by June 30.

Deloitte’s well-regarded chief communications director, Tony Ritchie, lost his position.

Remaining staff have been told Deutsch will outline “the way forward” at another virtual town hall meeting on July 24.

“As we all know, the last couple of weeks have been tough for our firm,” he advised.

It seems the big four professional services firm had way too much of its income coming from ad hoc consultancy and not enough through the more permanent, but dreary income streams.

Deutsch told the still intact partners that their 20 per cent profit share cut was the “least worst option”.

The underlings who are taking a pay cut of 20 per cent for five months had the impression their sacrifice meant jobs would not be lost.

Tooth or fiction?

Procter & Gamble took Colgate-Palmolive to the Federal Court on Wednesday alleging their rival was falsely claiming its new whitening toothpaste could remove 10 years of stains.

Judge Jayne Jagot was being asked to expedite the proceedings.

Procter & Gamble allege the marketing of Colgate’s Optic White Renewal whitening toothpaste breached Australian Consumer Law. The company is seeking to stop the sale of the toothpaste, which hit supermarket shelves around March with marketing that suggests it “removes 10 years of yellow stains”.

Cate Nagy,from King & Wood Mallesons, is representing Colgate in the proceedings, with Procter being represented by Corrs Chambers Westgarth.

Colgate also claims its product “whitens teeth inside and out”. “There is no reliable scientific data,” the lawsuit states, relying on an affidavit from Georg Heuer, who Margin Call gleans is a brand manager rather than a bashful dentist in a white lab coat.

Procter & Gamble advised Justice Jagot that any continued advertising would see lost profits of its own Oral B whitening products.

Forrest’s land buy-up

Pastoralist Andrew Forrest appears to be set to expand his vast West Australian cattle holdings — possibly gaining an edge over fellow billionaires Gina Rinehart and Kerry Stokes.

There’s been no formal exchange, just whispers that Forrest is the preferred buyer of the prized Jubilee Downs cattle station.

Forrest’s private investment company, Tatterang, seems set to pay $30m for the station that covers about 220,000ha in WA’s Kimberley region.

Stokes owns Napier Downs Station in the Fitzroy Valley as well as Mount House station, which he bought in 2016.

In 2015, Forrest and Stokes were outbid by Rinehart when she secured the Fossil Downs station.

Rinehart, Stokes and Forrest have collectively spent more than $160m in six years on pastoral leases in the Fitzroy Valley.

Elders agent Greg Smith had previously advised Margin Call that he’d had second-round offers from seven known pastoralists and just the one would-be buyer who was needing FIRB approval.

Forrest’s expansion in the Kimberley comes 140 years after his great great uncle Alexander Forrest explored and surveyed the north. In 1879, Alexander Forrest named the 600km-long King Leopold Ranges after Belgium’s King Leopold II, but last week Aboriginal Affairs Minister Ben Wyatt described the king as an evil tyrant with no connection to WA. They will be renamed the Wunaamin Miliwundi Ranges.

Caught in the bunker

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is bunkered down in Canberra, since he’s got an enormously important economic update to deliver on July 23.

He’d been hoping to get back to see his family in Melbourne’s Hawthorn, until the state government declared its statewide stage-three lockdowns.

The border between Victoria and NSW (and presumably the ACT) was shut for the first time in a century, although politicians are allowed to move between states.

“We’re just working out if I can get home to see my family, because obviously they’re top of mind for me,” the Treasurer told Eddie McGuire’sTriple M Hot Breakfast. “It’s not about me, it’s about all the other Victorians who are doing it tough right now and our health workers on the front line,” he added.

Federal ministers from Victoria will be allowed into Canberra as essential workers, but ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr is questioning whether backbench MPs and swathes of staff members should be accorded the same privilege.

Brits’ outpost sold

It was first touted as being for sale under David Cameron’sprime ministership in 2010, amid post-global financial crisis austerity. A decade on and the grand Vaucluse residence of the British Foreign Office has finally been sold.

More than $10m has been secured for the home of its consul-general Michael Ward by Savills International’s Martin Schiller.

The 1930s home was built for former NSW chief justice Frederick Jordan to a design by John Drummond Moore, of Wardell, Moore & Dowling architecture firm.

The British government bought the Georgian-style Gilliver Avenue home in 1972 during Ted Heath’sgovernment for $405,000.

Post probe opens

The Senate inquiry into Australia Post got under way on Wednesday, with witnesses back in Melbourne, ahead of the hard lockdown.

Six Australia Post executives, who could not join chief executive Christine Holgate, joined via a video conference from the organisation’s board room at its Bourke Street headquarters.

The executives, including general counsel and company secretary Nick MacDonald, were sitting in every other chair — just like Post’s new delivery model of delivering every second business day in cities.

Eisen on deck

Billionaire businessman by day, DJ by night?

Afterpay boss Anthony Eisen inadvertently provided his adoring staff a glimpse into his youth when he presented to Afterpay’s Town Hall Q&A on Wednesday.

Distracted by the $800m raise, one eagle-eyed staffer spotted a set of DJ decks behind him as he addressed his staff seemingly from home, which could have been the $7.6m Byron Bay retreat or his $6.2m Brighton mansion.

One staffer sought details directly with the near-50-year-old.

“It’s a relic from a previous life — but I am actually trying to DJ more,” he said, suggesting that he would DJ at the next Afterpay conference.

Margin Call can only speculate what his DJ name will be, and his media team were not forthcoming.

It’s not known when Eisen started spinning, but surely not during his Sydney Boys Grammar schooling. Nor when he was an investment banker at Hambros back in the day.

DJ Eisen, mic drop.