It’s a cosy world in financial services

Illustration: Rod Clement

How’s this for awkward: Brian Salter, the in-house counsel at Catherine Brenner’s hapless AMP, was the best man at former ASIC chairman Greg Medcraft’s wedding.

It sure is cosy in Australian ­financial services land.

The former Societe Generale investment banker Medcraft — who has since relocated to Paris for a plum gig at the OECD — and financial services lawyer Salter have known each other for more than a quarter of a century.

A quick refresher: Salter was sent on leave from Brenner’s endangered wealth business on Friday after Kenneth Hayne’s royal commission heard evidence that AMP had lied at least 20 times to the corporate regulator, then under Medcraft’s stewardship.

That would not appear to be behaviour traditionally associated with a best man.

Salter, who has been AMP’s chief internal lawyer since he joined from law firm Clayton Utz in 2008, was also part of the team overseen by chairman Brenner, of Sydney’s Centennial Park, that doctored an ironically named “independent” report into AMP’s industry-leading fee-for-no-service rort.

That not-at-all-independent report was done by Salter’s old shop, the Robert Cutler-led Clayton Utz.

For these alleged sins Medcraft’s best man has been stood down from the disciplinary panel at what is now James Shipton’s corporate watchdog. The high-powered panel guides ASIC on its discipline of rogue financial planners.

Some onlookers doubt Salter will ever return to his AMP gig for which he was remunerated $2.74 million in 2017.

That made Salter last year the seventh best paid member of the now departed CEO Craig Meller’s 12-member executive team, who together were remunerated $40.7m by Brennan’s AMP board. Aren’t they generous with other people’s money?

At least someone has made money out of AMP. Their disgruntled army of customers charged for AMP’s fees-for-no-service product can’t say as much.

Nor can shareholders. News of three potential class actions yesterday sent the stock down another 3 per cent. That was its seventh consecutive trading day in the red.

And there’s no sign of an end to the bleeding yet.

Made for Myer

As long as Peter Dutton’s immigration department issues him a visa, John King will be the latest British retailer to run Myer.

The department store’s shareholders were in an uncharacteristic good mood on the King news, sending the stock up 8.5 per cent to 38.5c.

King ran UK department store House of Fraser until it was gobbled up by Chinese conglomerate Sanpower in 2014, back when the Middle Kingdom was in the midst of a worldwide buying spree.

Since then, King and his American wife have relocated to Fort Lauderdale, a humid outpost in Florida, and a
45-minute drive from Donald Trump’s winter White House, Mar-a-Lago.

Fort Lauderdale is traditionally a spot where executive careers go to die.
But, evidently, King’s retail career was only having a long blink.

King, who intends to relocate to Melbourne for the job, will take over from Myer’s executive chairman Garry “Call me old fashioned” Hounsell. That should free up time for Hounsell to man the barricades against his hostile billionaire shareholder Solomon Lew.

The incoming CEO has had some useful preparation for his new Myer assignment.

Margin Call understands one of the retailers for which King has been consulting from his semi-retirement village in Florida is Eddie Lampert’s Sears, the Myer of America, which has been disappointing shareholders for almost a decade.

Perfect experience for his new gig, as long as Dutton sorts out that visa.

Miserable sods

Sean Aylmer — until October last year the most senior journalist at Fairfax Media — has joined Gabriel McDowell’s corporate communications firm Res Publica.

Aylmer, once an economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia and a former publisher of Fairfax’s Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, joins Res Publica’s executive chairman McDowell, managing partner James Tait and former NSW National Party director Nathan Quigley.

Margin Call understands the new recruit will focus on signing up clients in the financial services industry, which is currently being battered by Kenneth Hayne’s royal commission.

Aylmer, the former chief undertaker at Greg Hywood’s Fairfax, made headlines in March for stating the bleeding obvious, telling a marketing conference that journalists are “insecure” and can be “a miserable bunch”.

Following the mini-media storm, the always polite Aylmer told The Oz’s media diarist Stephen Brook he regretted using the word “miserable”.

“I shouldn’t have used the word miserable. Journalists are smart, they really are … I should have said critical thinkers,” Aylmer told Diary.

Aylmer is also well known in media circles for his beneficent corporate credit card, particularly on excursions to Canberra for the budget lockup.

As Margin Call can attest, those bar tabs were legendary.

Frog in his throat

Back to the royal commission where Andrew “$6.3m” Thorburn’s Maserati-driving NAB wealth boss Andrew “$3.5m” Hagger briefly took the stand yesterday afternoon.

His exchange with counsel assisting Rowena “Shock and” Orr was so brief that Hagger only had time to apologise once: for his “croaky voice”.

That likely has something to do with Hagger’s performance last week with his new musical supergroup Catsplay at Brunswick’s Jazzlab.

Hagger, who chairs the NAB-owned private wealth and stockbroking group JBWere, as well as running NAB’s wealth management arm MLC, returns to the stand this morning.

We’ll be stunned if there aren’t a few more apologies.