How JLL bungled its report into workplace conduct; Fortescue’s emissions contribution heats room
Not content with sitting by and watching their wildly profitable Australian business implode, the American leadership of JLL appears to have cocked up the investigation into the cultural problems that was supposed to fix it all.
JLL released a brief summary of the investigation on Monday, conducted by silver circle law firm Clyde & Co.
The commercial property agency also said it had sacked a couple of people – now confirmed as star industrial agents Peter Blade and Greg Pike – in the wake of a workplace scandal which included allegations of client visits to strip clubs, workplace harassment and sundry locker room conduct.
The two men, who deny any involvement in the scandals, are now suing the firm, alleging they weren’t given a chance to put their side of the story to the investigators. Rather than being told what the allegations against them were ahead of time, they were simply invited in for a general chat about stuff. Which they declined to do.
Then they were given their notice ahead of the delivery of the final report – not due to any findings of wrongdoing, but because JLL decided the industrial side of the business needed new leadership.
Even the letter sacking them, we hear, included an admission from JLL that they hadn’t been able to take part in the investigation into cultural problems at the firm.
That’s all of a bit odd, really, given JLL on Monday was trumpeting that the report would give the company a bit of clean air. The Clyde & Co report, JLL said, made several recommendations including “cultural issues and addressing procedural failures associated with misconduct”.
Call us old fashioned, but whatever you’re said to have done, Margin Call’s definition of procedural fairness includes the right to respond to accusations of bad behaviour.
A fair turnabout, some might say, for the whitewash of internal investigations into the alleged behaviour in the first place.
But it hardly gives you confidence in the idea that JLL’s global headquarters are suddenly interested in beefing up the procedural failings of the previous era.
Mind you, you don’t generally pick a law firm to run an investigation into your internal affairs because you want to fix them. That takes graft and hard work by management, in this case the bigwigs in Chicago such as JLL’s global CEO, Christian Ulbrich, and its head of HR, Laura Adams, if the local bosses aren’t up to it.
Nope, normally you brief a law firm for the job so you can hide the results – and even the terms of reference – behind a screen of “legal professional privilege”.
No guarantee that claim will succeed in court – you have to demonstrate the primary purpose of the report was to provide legal advice over a potential lawsuit, rather than being an actual investigation into the company’s affairs. Another odd coincidence, then, that Clyde & Co were brought in the same day JLL sacked Australian CEO Dan Kernaghan – now about to sue JLL on his own behalf.
Wheels within wheels, as they say.
Fortescue’s contribution a heated issue
Much has been made this week in the media of a new study by Australian National University researchers on the impact of Woodside Energy’s controversial Scarborough gas project, off the coast of WA.
Gas from the project, we’re told, will generate 876 million tonnes of carbon dioxide over its 30-year life if burned as fuel, contributing 0.00039°C of additional global warming in its own right. That will help kill an additional 484 people through heat-related deaths in Europe over the next 75 years, and wreck about 16 million additional corals on the Great Barrier Reef, the report says.
The study was partly funded by Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation, for the record, as part of the mining billionaire’s climate crusade against the future impact of lethal humidity.
And no criticism of the academics here – we’re sure their maths is fine, and their intentions are worthy.
But here’s another couple of figures that might be of interest.
Fortescue’s annual scope 3 carbon emissions – those are the ones associated with the use of its iron ore by steel mills – were 275.9 million tonnes last financial year, according to its most recent annual report.
Woodside’s scope 3 from burning its gas? 74.7 million tonnes in 2024.
Does that mean Fortescue is killing almost four times more people than Woodside each year? Clearly not; the argument is facile.
And Fortescue’s iron ore operations will pass Scarborough’s total 876 million tonnes of scope 3 emissions in only three years and a couple of months, according to our maths.
Should we shut it down, or block any expansions or extensions – such as Fortescue’s planned new iron ore mine in Gabon, for example?
Again, it’s a facile argument. We’re sure even Forrest would agree.
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