Life goes on for Catherine Brenner after AMP debacle

Illustration: Rod Clement.

Heads turned at Sydney’s Chifley Tower yesterday as AMP’s former chairman Catherine Brenner entered the prestigious CBD haven of investment bankers, non-executive directors and the Harbour City’s various Masters of the Universe.

After a harrowing four weeks, the 47-year-old Brenner was stepping out from behind tinted windows to get on with business.

Twelve days ago, Mike Wilkins temporarily took over the chairmanship of AMP. Ten days before that, then chair Brenner brought forward the departure of AMP’s former CEO Craig Meller, sent AMP’s now dismissed head lawyer Brian Salter on leave and apolo­gised for the regulatory sins that have turned the 169-year-old company into the highest-profile cas­ualty of Kenneth Hayne’s banking royal commission.

So it was perhaps understandable Brenner decided against an interview with Margin Call when we popped out from behind a Chifley Tower pillar after spotting her having a late morning coffee outside the building with one of her advisers, corporate consigliere Sue Cato.

Brenner instead set off to her private office in Chifley Tower, the same lofty building occupied by her corporate mentor David Gonski.

While keeping an eye on the ongoing AMP carnage, Brenner has been keeping busy with her other blue-chip directorships on the Brian Clark-chaired building materials outfit Boral and the Ilana Atlas-chaired beverage giant Coca-Cola Amatil.

Former AMP chairman Catherine Brenner having coffee with a friend in Sydney yesterday. Picture: John Feder

Brenner’s Boral direct duties have required keeping abreast of Victorian CFMEU secretary John Setka’s ongoing case in the Melbourne Magistrates Court over the union heavy’s alleged blackmailing of the building group.

On Wednesday, ACTU boss Sally McManus helped recruit more than 100,000 of the “change the rules” brigade to march through Melbourne in support of the infamous Setka. It was an extraordinary demonstration of the unpopularity of corporate Australia in 2018.

Next week Brenner will trek from her Centennial Park trophy home to North Sydney for Coca-Cola Amatil’s annual general meeting. Mercifully, she is not up for re-election.

Her duties on the board of prestigious Sydney girls school SCEGGS Darlinghurst — on which she sits alongside former CBA chief executive Ian Narev, another recent Australian finance casualty — have also demanded attention, as it considered the Turnbull government-commissioned, Gonski-led report on teaching standards.

Whatever Brenner’s relationship with its author, SCEGGS head of school Jenny Allum called the Gonski review an “abject failure”.

“We have missed an opportunity to make meaningful changes to the Australian ­education scene,” Allum wrote recently.

The day before Brenner’s Chifley outing late on Friday morning, AMP’s stoic interim chairman Mike Wilkins presided over an anguished annual general meeting in Melbourne’s Grand Hyatt.

As expected, the gathering of the wealth and insurance giant’s furious shareholders did not go well.

By the end of the meeting, a remarkable 61.5 per cent of shareholders voted against AMP’s remuneration report, Brenner’s former boardmate Andrew Harmos, an Auckland lawyer, received a stunning 37.67 per cent vote against his continuation on the shrinking board and another $360 million of AMP’s sharemarket value was destroyed.

Yesterday, AMP lost another 5.8 per cent, or more than $600m worth of market cap.

More than $3 billion of shareholder value of the now $10.9bn company has been lost since its humiliation in the Hayne Show less than four weeks ago.

Four separate class actions have been threatened against the company, and corporate regulator ASIC’s investigation into AMP’s fees-for-no-service rort remains active.

In her now limited capacity as a shareholder, Brenner continues to support the besieged company.

Sources close to Brenner tell Margin Call the former AMP chair cast her circa-$150,000 worth of AMP shares in support of Wilkins’s team ahead of this week’s meeting.

Brenner took over AMP’s formerly prized chairmanship from former Macquarie Group executive Simon McKeon in murky circumstances two years ago.

The impeccably groomed protege of Gonski — who appointed Brenner, a former investment banker, to Coca-Cola Amatil’s board in 2008 — has had the misfortune of becoming a Rorschach test on gender in Australia.

Some see in her a cautionary tale about gender quotas, an opinion not tempered by almost a decade of near comatose governance at the David Turner-chaired Commonwealth Bank, which a fortnight ago was roasted by an independent report financial regulator APRA.

Others see in Brenner’s treatment proof of ongoing sexism in corporate Australia.

From boardrooms to coffee shops to talkback radio, everyone has had an opinion — some of them reasonable, some of them nasty — on this company director.

Putting aside headstrong incoming AMP chairman David Murray, who would join a listed financial group board right now?

Tower of power

Catherine Brenner wasn’t the only high-profile person in Chifley Tower late yesterday morning associated with Kenneth Hayne’s banking royal commission.

While walking to her private office, Brenner almost bumped into Adele Ferguson, who was waiting on a sofa in the Chifley foyer.

The Fairfax journalist, along with Commonwealth Bank whistleblower Jeff Morris, Nationals senator John ‘‘Wacka’’ Williams and Fin Review-hate figure Sam Dastyari, was one of the key drivers for the banking royal commission.

If only the hard-at-work Ferguson wasn’t distracted by her phone screen, she could have had quite the catch-up.

And Brenner wasn’t the only financial figure in Chifley Tower yesterday to have had a rude ASIC experience.

Trumping her run-in with the corporate regulator — and every bit as well groomed as the former AMP chair — was recent Cooma jail inmate Oliver Curtis, who Brenner also passed unawares on her way to her office

Young Curtis, the husband of publicist Roxy Jacenko, was catching a coffee at Chifley’s indoor cafe with his boss and father Nick Curtis, the former Macquarie Group executive and founder of rare earths outfit Lynas.

Under the leadership of managing director Amanda Lacaze, the now $1.8bn Lynas has had an amazing turnaround in recent years.

On standing down as the chairman of the then distressed Lynas at the start of 2015, Oli’s father declared 4.22 million shares in his final director’s interest notice. If Curtis the elder has held on to them, they would now be worth $11.5m.

So Margin Call has to ask, has he?

“That’s my private business,” he told us.

Much worse than prying into his private affairs, we forgot to wish Curtis senior a happy birthday. Yesterday he turned 61. And many more!