Margin Call: From dusk till AMP’s AGM

AMP chair-elect and former Commonwealth Bank boss David Murray. (Picture Mike Batterham)

AMP chair-elect and former Commonwealth Bank boss David Murray officially has a major problem with women.

AMP’s fee-for-service scandal — the unquestionable star of the bloody last round of Ken Hayne’s Royal Commission — has claimed another three scalps. This violent corporate story is increasingly resembling a Quentin Tarantino movie.

Margin Call understands that two non-executive directors, Bowral-based retail expert Holly Kramer and professional consultant Vanessa Wallace, had no prospect of being re-elected to the AMP board at Thursday’s AGM.

We understand investors voted overwhelmingly against them in ballots cast ahead of the meeting.

Their resignation today means the rejected pair will avoid the humiliation of being voted off the AMP board at Thursday’s meeting at Melbourne’s Grand Hyatt, where there was no prospect of a sufficient percentage of AMP shareholders being in attendance to vote in favour of Kramer and Wallace to turn around the negative result.

That’s an early rejection of the authority of interim executive chair Mike Wilkins and the forthright Murray, who will take over running the boardroom in July. Both had implored investors to re-elect Kramer and Wallace in the interests of boardroom stability.

Outgoing AMP board member Patty Akopiantz. (Supplied)

Their New York-born, Bellevue Hill residing colleague Patty Akopiantz, the longest serving remaining member of the AMP board, also announced this morning she will exit at the end of the year.

Throw her on the growing pile that includes the stunned financial services group’s fallen chairman Catherine Brenner and, for a bit of gender diversity, sacked AMP lawyer Brian Salter, who is now exploring his legal options against his former employer.

After Akopiantz’s departure, AMP will have an entirely male boardroom: former IAG boss Wilkins, former Aviva boss Trevor Matthews, foreign policy mandarin Peter Varghese, Seek’s chief financial officer Geoff Roberts and Auckland lawyer Andrew Harmos, as of this morning the only AMP director up for election at Thursday’s summit with the company’s furious shareholders.

Looks like another problem former outspoken Future Fund chair Murray is going to have to fix.

Big chunks of AMP’s registry have commitments to their investors to only hold stock in companies that meet prescribed gender targets.

Larry Fink’s BlackRock — which owns 5 per cent of AMP — in February announced that companies must have at least two female directors to be fit for their $6.3 trillion under management.

For now investors are untroubled by the triple departure. AMP’s stock was almost unmoved at $4.11.

Meanwhile, we hear Harmos is likely to scrape back onto the board, albeit with a significant protest vote against him. Harmos has been a director of AMP Life since August 2013 but only joined the AMP board proper last June. But it’s not all departures at AMP.

Margin Call can reveal AMP’s crisis management team has been joined by former Commonwealth Bank spinner Kate Abrahams, who exited that troubled group last month.

Former investment banker Abrahams, who is consulting to AMP, is a financial services veteran, whose career has spanned Deutsche Bank, Perpetual and CBA. She’s also a terrific skier.

The AMP consulting gig sees her join forces in the emergency room with Ross Thornton and Jim Kelly’s Domestique outfit, which is assisting AMP chief of staff Helen Livesey and former Fin Review journo Lachlan Johnston.

Margin Call understands also working with Domestique on a similar basis to Abrahams is the former London-based Rio Tinto flack and adviser to then Liberal prime minister John Howard, David Luff, who returned to Sydney from London with his young family earlier this year. Luffy is also assisting with AMP. Clearly, they need all the help they can get.

Read the full Margin Call column tomorrow in print and online.