Email was part of Guthrie’s last-ditch pitch to save her job

Cartoon: Rod Clement.

Things were moving very fast at ABC’s Ultimo headquarters today, with Justin Milne’s boardmates coordinating diaries for yet another crisis meeting.

Meanwhile, their former managing director turned nemesis Michelle Guthrie is believed to be in Sydney taking counsel on what she will do next.

The impending meeting of the ABC board - which Margin Call understands will be their sixth in the last eight days - follows revelations in Fairfax that Milne had written an email to Guthrie in May that ordered the sacking of ABC journalist Emma Alberici.

“Get rid of her. We need to save the ABC - not Emma,” Milne wrote to Guthrie.

Margin Call understands extracts from the email were circulated by Guthrie to Milne’s board members on Friday in what appeared to be a last ditch attempt to extend her career at the broadcaster.

After considering Guthrie’s Friday dossier over the weekend, Milne’s board met on Sunday when they resolved to sack the former Google executive because of what they had long determined to be her ineffective leadership style.

The top of the agenda for the ABC board’s upcoming meeting: what other damaging information in Guthrie’s dossier could leak?

And can Milne, a former business partner of former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, survive today’s stunning attack?

Guthrie’s plea

It was last Tuesday when ­Michelle Guthrie made her pitch to Justin Milne’s ABC board.

The nub of the plea Guthrie made to two emissaries from chairman Milne’s board: “Give me one more year.”

Michelle Guthrie

As well as two of Milne’s ABC board members and Guthrie, the now former managing director’s counsel Kate Eastman — a high-profile human rights lawyer — was in attendance for the meeting at the national broadcaster’s Ultimo headquarters.

Justin Milne

Now more than a month since it formally began, the removal of Guthrie, a former Singapore-based Google executive, was not going well.

It was back in August, more than a month before, when chairman Milne and his boardmate Donny Walford, an executive coach, met Guthrie — again in the ABC’s headquarters in Sydney’s inner-city Ultimo — to tell Aunty’s boss of 2½ years that things were not working out.

Donny Walford

Before the end of August the ABC board emailed their concerns, including the boss’s failure to unite staff, inability to lead and inadequate engagement. Guthrie, despite later claims, was supposed to be in no doubt about the severity of the situation.

More correspondence followed. There were more meetings, including a “workshop” with Guthrie and the board in early September to explore what wasn’t working.

And then on September 13, Milne and another board-mate Vanessa Guthrie, the chair of the Minerals Council of Australia, visited Guthrie, again at ABC’s Ultimo HQ.

As has been reported, Guthrie was then asked for her resignation. She pushed back.

More meetings. More correspondence. Then last Tuesday’s plea for one more year.

It was all intensely personal for Guthrie. Her youngest daughter next year will sit the HSC at Kambala, the prestigious Harbourside private school in Sydney’s Rose Bay which ­Guthrie herself had attended.

One more year would get her daughter through that, as had always been the executive’s plan when taking up the ABC gig.

Milne’s full board — which as well as Walford and Guthrie includes McGrath chair Peter Lewis, SCA Property Group ­director Kirstin Ferguson, Royal Flying Doctor Service director Georgie Somerset, investment banker Joe Gersh and ABC staff director Jane Connors — met later on Tuesday to contemplate Guthrie’s pitch.

No way, was their decision.

The two camps, Guthrie and her counsel Eastman, and two members of Milne’s board, met days later to try again.

Milne’s ABC emissaries made a counter-proposal that would end the Guthrie era earlier, but soften the departure with favourable financial terms. (Margin Call understands Guthrie’s contract entitled her to about a year’s salary, or $900,000, in the event of her being dismissed without cause.)

Negotiations took place. The ABC directors later reported to their board, thinking a deal had been struck.

After more than a month’s ugliness, an elegant solution seemed to have been achieved.

The two parties lawyers got to drafting on Friday morning — until, suddenly, the proposal was removed by Guthrie’s camp.

Later on Friday the board, stunned by what they thought to be an absurd turn of events, met for a discussion.

By this stage all felt thoroughly vindicated by the justness of their cause. The messiness of the negotiations proved their point.

As they resolved at a later gathering on Sunday, come what may, the situation was untenable.

Fair cop

Some words in Michelle Guthrie’s defence.

The story of her non-attendance at Senate estimates in May has done the rounds in the autopsy of her ABC career.

Margin Call understands that Guthrie’s exec Louise Higgins went on the managing director’s behalf not because the Aunty boss was scared, or disinterested, with Canberra. Rather Guthrie was overseas at her elder daughter’s university graduation, a situation of which the Senate communications committee was well informed.

Seems a fair excuse.

Pipe up

At least one member of Scott Morrison’s ministry has a familial financial stake in the proposed $13 billion takeover of gas pipeline operator APA Group by billionaire Li Ka-shing’s empire.

The infrastructure deal, which would be the Hong Kong-based conglomerate CK Group’s biggest overseas acquisition, is the talk of Canberra’s intelligence community.

Morrison and his Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will determine its fate, after receiving advice from former chief spook David Irvine’s Foreign Investment Review Board (and, perhaps, taking the temperature of the combined Coalition partyrooms).

Liberal backbenchers Jim Molan and Andrew Hastie, among others, strongly oppose it on security grounds.

Michael McCormack’s Nationals overwhelmingly oppose it — all the more so now their regional Australia nemesis Pauline Hanson has come out against it.

In the yes camp, APA chairman Michael Fraser and his board have recommended the lucrative deal to their shareholders. Their most personally invested member is APA’s managing director Mick McCormack (not to be confused with the Nationals leader) who has an interest of up to $10 million in its completion.

And with a more modest stake in the outcome is Minister of the Moment Ken Wyatt’s wife Anna-Maria Palermo. The register of members’ interests declares that she is an APA shareholder.

Wyatt chose not to share his thoughts on the transaction with Margin Call. But the West Australian MP should be well informed if his colleagues ask his opinion.