Mayday on Guthrie’s big payday

Illustration: Rod Clement.

How many cents a day will each Australian taxpayer end up paying for Michelle Guthrie’s golden bungee jump from the ABC?

Margin Call understands Guthrie’s closely guarded statement of claim in the Fair Work Commission makes clear that, whatever the additional motivations, her ambitious legal adventure is very much about money.

Indeed, sources close to the ABC familiar with the claim — which was lodged last week — tell us it concerns more than just the remaining two and a half years of her original five-year contract.

We understand in the claim, Guthrie also floats a potential second five-year term.

In light of the unanimous decision by former ABC chair Justin Milne and his board, that seems optimistic, to put it mildly.

And it was hardly a secret that Guthrie did not intend to hang around Ultimo for much longer than her youngest daughter’s final year at school, which is next year.

Guthrie’s pay at Aunty began at $900,000 a year. We’re told it crept up to above $1 million a year towards the end of her first five-year contract.

A compensation claim for forfeited earnings through to the end of a second term in 2026 could run to almost $8.5m.

And it doesn’t end there.

As well as forfeited compensation, Guthrie’s claim — which, to use its formal legal name, is a “general protections application involving dismissal” — also raises damages for loss of reputation, compensation for humiliation and legal costs.

Seems there’s money to be made championing the ABC’s independence.

The Fair Work process takes place behind closed doors, not an ideal situation for interested onlookers.

Thankfully, as employees of a government-owned outfit, the ABC’s management team has to appear before the senate’s communications committee to keep them abreast of goings on.

As it happens, committee chair Jonathon Duniam and his senators this afternoon have a few hours of questioning booked in with the ABC’s acting managing director David Anderson.

Surely Anderson will have a well-informed view on the potential size of the payout his broadcaster, and ultimately the Australian taxpayer, may have to pay Guthrie.

Worth a question or two.

In the hotseat

Still on Aunty, Margin Call was interested to learn acting ABC chair Kirstin Ferguson was given the opportunity to attend today’s estimates committee.

We gather Ferguson was unable to attend. Her turn will come.

Packer’s guru

The revelations keep coming.

Until we read our colleague Damon Kitney’s The Prince of Fortune: The Untold Story of Being James Packer, we had no idea that the Maharishi Thom Knoles was part of James Packer’s entourage.

James Packer's spiritual adviser, the Maharishi Thom Knoles

Nor did we know that it was none other that the rock star banker Matthew Grounds and his wife Kimberley who introduced Packer to the enigmatic spiritual adviser.

“In hindsight, this [introduction] probably wasn’t one of my better calls,” the UBS boss Grounds tells Kitney in his soon-to-be bestseller.

“But I guess he seems to make James happy, so maybe it’s been worthwhile from his perspective,” Grounds adds.

The extravagantly bearded, American-born Maharishi is an expert in Vedic meditation and once practised in Sydney.

The Price of Fortune by Damon Kitney.

In 2013, after their introduction by the Grounds family, Packer went with the Maharishi to the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India.

Knoles tells Kitney that Packer is one of only five clients around the world for whom the spiritual adviser is on call. A fortune last valued at $5.25 billion helps with these things.

Happily, the outlook from the great seer is sunny.

“I think that we are still to see James’s best days,” says Knoles.

Packer notes, with frankness characteristic of his contributions throughout the book, that there is a “commercial” aspect to their otherwise spiritual relationship.

But it’s not on the level of Packer’s commercial relationship with Grounds.

The book documents, as we noted last week, that by the arithmetic of Packer’s financial lieutenant Mike Johnston, the billionaire paid Grounds’ UBS bankers $115 million in fees.

As Knoles says of Packer: “He is a giver.”

Face the music

Despite his many cameos and despite being listed as a confirmed guest, the Maharishi Matthew Grounds was a no-show at the new Packer biography’s launch yesterday at HarperCollins headquarters in Sydney.

Also keeping away was Lloyd Williams, one of several father figures to Packer.

Margin Call understands Williams was to launch the book, but pulled out last week.

There’s undoubtedly a sense of unease among some of the Packer coterie about some of the subject matter in the book.

Lloyd Williams. Picture: AAP

Some are worried about Packer’s attitude to the published work, which the billionaire co-operated on but had no control over. They perhaps don’t want to be seen as being too close to something that might upset future fees.

Others are more self-assured.

Packer’s first wife Jodhi Meares was along at the publisher’s tower, which stands a stone’s throw from the Packer family’s former Park Street office.

The billionaire’s financial adviser Mark Johnson (of the UBS fee arithmetic) was also along with Crown Resorts chief financial officer Ken Barton, former PBL boss Peter Yates and Consolidated Press Holdings executives Mark Arbib and Sam McKay.

Good to see not everyone in Packerland is hiding under their doonas.