Mark Barnaba on big bucks at Fortescue; Building Commissioner David Chandler ruffles feathers
Salted further back in Fortescue Metals’ annual report are figures revealing the startlingly high salary provided to deputy chairman Mark Barnaba, who accepted more than $1m simply to get out of bed a few times each year.
Barnaba earned $1,113,750 for his work in appearing at little more than a handful of board meetings, an amount roughly four times higher than that of his colleagues seated around the same table.
It would make greater sense if Barnaba was required to chair all seven meetings, but on the figures provided there were only two occasions when Andrew Forrest was unavailable.
Equally surprising is Barnaba’s base salary, which is higher than those of some Fortescue executives. We’re talking mainly about chief operating officer Dino Otranto, who received a paltry $838,445 last year before benefits and incentives.
For added perspective, Barnaba earns almost the same amount as BHP chairman Ken MacKenzie, who received circa $1.3m last year; if he’s not the highest-paid non-executive director in the country then he’s at least floating somewhere in the troposphere.
Again, this would be easier to rationalise if Barnaba was married to Fortescue and spent most of his waking moments thinking endlessly about the company. But Fortescue is not even close to his only paid gig; he currently chairs the RBA board’s audit committee, the board of tech firm GLX, and the investment committee at health fund HBF, along with a slew of other commitments.
Meanwhile, during a call with analysts on Monday, Forrest was asked once against about succession plans for outgoing CEO Elizabeth Gaines, prompting the executive chairman to stroppily admit that he would replace her in due course, calling the matter a lower priority than some of his other recruiting ambitions.
“We have other appointments which we want to make, which are even more important to the evolution of a global green energy company,” he said.
Ah, yes, a global green energy company, one that churns out vats of green hydrogen, a product that, by his own admission, is still so elusive that not even a bucket of the stuff has been manufactured.
There’s that trademark humility for which Forrest is best known and which, surprisingly, ranked a prominent mention in a chaotically punctuated chairman’s letter promulgating Fortescue’s virtues.
“As we are now, back then, we were humble, frugal, empowered, enthusiastic and just a little courageous with determination as steely as our product, we would never give up (sic),” it said.
Was it therefore an act of humility when Forrest’s company took $45m in taxpayer dollars from the Morrison government to recoup the costs of a project that was already funded?
Was it an act of humility to go begging for those dollars in the same year that Fortescue posted a record half year for iron ore shipments? Or while it paid out $11bn in dividend payments?
Humility and frugality, eh? Words that Forrest should strike out from his personal lexicon.
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Building relationships
NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler resigned in an almighty huff from his role in July after being asked to sign up to a code of conduct that sought to rein in his famously cantankerous behaviour.
A curmudgeon of the highest order, Chandler had been accused of throwing his weight around on building sites in a bid to course-correct a sector that, let’s be fair, had become replete with unscrupulous developers and flamboyant shonks who enjoy a nodding acquaintance with many of the city’s cocaine dealers.
This garnered Chandler no shortage of enemies, of course, many of whom are now livid at his decision, requested by the NSW government, to reverse his resignation.
Margin Call understands that a legal letter has already arrived from lawyers representing comical figure Jean Nassif, director of Toplace Pty Ltd, demanding that the building commissioner “cease and desist” from having further involvement with the company.
Nassif, for anyone unfamiliar, briefly went viral in 2019 after buying his wife a $480,000 Lamborghini and behaving like a silly tosser about it; he was later charged with assaulting her, in May, but the charges were withdrawn when she failed to show up to court.
It’s Nassif’s view that Chandler harbours “personal malice” towards him and his company, enough to prompt a threat of legal action against Chandler’s boss, Emma Hogan, Secretary of the Department of Customer Service.
The letter from EA Legal’s Gregory Wee outlines a slew of grievances with Chandler’s operating style, including alleged threats made on July 26 when the building commissioner met with Toplace officials at a building site in Botany Bay, outlining his plans to retire.
“Mr Chandler stated words to the effect he would ‘take a lot of people down with me’ before his retirement on 30 November 2022,” the letter stated.
At a previous meeting with Toplace, in October, Chandler purportedly told officials that he would be appearing before a parliamentary estimates committee in the coming weeks and would likely be asked about the company.
“I can say a lot under parliamentary privilege,” he is alleged to have said.
The letter further accuses Chandler of wishing to convey an ability and willingness to “exercise informal, non-justiciable, power over Toplace and Mr Nassif”, and calls this behaviour a “gross abuse of power”.
The cease and desist letter threatens “judicial relief” if its conditions, namely that Chandler back off from the company, are not met.
Comment was sought from Chandler and Hogan.
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