Men rule the roost at Seven West Media

Illustration: Rod Clement.

Once its Supreme Court demolition job on its former secretary Amber Harrison is done, Seven West Media will be able to focus on other matters — such as recruiting new female directors to its board.

Seven West Media’s nine-person board is one of corporate Australia’s more masculine beasts.

Chaired by the strong-willed proprietor Kerry Stokes, it also includes his son Ryan, his CEO Tim Worner (Harrison’s former lover whom Stokes regards as being “like a son”), James Packer’s fixer John Alexander, Stokes’s trusted adviser Peter Gammell, stockbroker David Evans, iiNet founder Michael Malone, former Victoria premier Jeff Kennett and — after the controversial February departure of commercial law expert Sheila McGregor — just a single woman, Michelle Deaker, the managing partner of venture capital firm OneVentures.

That’s just one woman on the nine-person board — well under the meagre Australian average of 25 per cent in big companies.

The remaining female board member at Seven West, Michelle Deaker. Picture: Renee Nowytarger.

There are other oddities. Kennett, as we’ve noted before, pockets $200,000 a year to be interviewed on the network from time to time as a political commentator. That’s on top of his $126,281, plus super, in director’s fees. Although as his and other Seven directors’ reputations are associated with the flamethrower treatment burning through the courts, we’d forgive him for questioning if there weren’t better ways to supplement his parliamentary pension.

Deaker, meanwhile, has a tangle of board connections. One of the key investors in her venture capital outfit is trusted Stokes lieutenant — and fellow SWM board member — Peter Gammell. He’s also a OneVentures board member.

Taking the mike

There’s been a fair bit of confusion about why, after a violent seven-month public legal brawl, Amber Harrison pulled out of her Supreme Court trial against Seven, days before it began.

Why fight so hard, only to ­retreat at the end?

Seems a fair question.

So today at 10am, Harrison will phone into Justice John Sackar’s Court in Sydney and explain herself.

That’s assuming her microphone isn’t cut off because the court deems she has wandered off topic. Harrison — who yesterday was accused of repeatedly using the media to launch a “reign of terror” against former partners — is supposed to be addressing the subject of costs.

In addressing that subject, we gather she will tell the court that her case was abandoned because Seven made it impossible to get the evidence required to run it. We’ll soon hear what the judge — not to mention Seven’s legal army — makes of that.

Harrison will also — unless of course that mike is silenced, quicker than a defender of Mike Baird’s greyhound ban calling into Ray Hadley’s morning radio show — argue that her case was not, as Seven suggested in yesterday’s evidence, fuelled by bitterness at an ex-lover.

Rather than being angry about the failed relationship, she’ll say she was mad about what the company did next.

It will be fascinating to see how Sackar handles what will be one of the stranger episodes in court 7B.

Costly affair

Yes, costs will be the subject of the day.

Seven is asking the court to order Amber Harrison to pay for their costs — although we gather it will only be for those directly related to this Supreme Court case, which dates back to February.

So it seems that demand will exclude the costs Seven incurred when it asked Twitter to remove tweets in Australia posted by Harrison in her nuclear phase. Twitter dutifully obliged.

And it will exclude the costs Seven incurred when it asked Google to suppress pages that are displayed under the racy search term “T im Worner”. Google dutifully obliged.

Seven West Media chief executive Tim Worner. Picture: Kym Smith.

And it will also exclude the costs Seven is incurring in its ongoing case against a rogue publisher — not us! — who has flagrantly disregarded the media network’s sweeping injunction order.

But it seems it will include the costs the media empire incurred when it asked Andy Penn’s Telstra — via persuasive subpoena — to produce the call history between Harrison and ten journalists, including one of us. On March 17, Telstra dutifully obliged.

So what has been the total cost of the Harrison affair to Seven since way back in 2012, when Worner’s roving eye meet Harrison, then an executive assistant at Pacific Magazines, when she walked into a meeting carrying a tray of sandwiches?

Seven hasn’t yet divulged the embarrassingly large figure, which will be somewhere in the millions.

But a spokesperson for the media network did tell us that all directors, so long as they have asked, have been informed of the total cost and, so long as they have asked, have been regularly updated.

Blood sport

Kerry Stokes’s legal overlord and last weekend’s cover star of Good Weekend Bruce McWilliam, his Gucci shoes and English tailored suit were along — all as a bundle — in the Supreme Court to watch yesterday’s blood bath.

Unfortunately the brutalist court is not furnished with any Chippendale chairs — or studio knock-offs — so he had to make do with an ordinary seat, sans carved armrests or embroidered seat.

As flagged on Friday, Harrison didn’t turn up and her former lawyer, Patron’s Shane Wescott, appeared briefly to explain that he had been stood down before leaving the court.

Harrison’s non-attendance answered the old riddle: if a gazelle doesn’t turn up to a savanna, can a lion still maul it? Turns out it can.

In the audience along with McWilliam to watch Seven’s barrister Andrew Bell bring the pain was another Seven barrister and Johnson Winter & Slattery partner Ruveni Kelleher, who — if only for the eye-watering size of the billable hours that have piled up since 2014 — could be about the only person in the country not wanting this saga to end.

Supporting Kelleher were, by our count, another three JWS junior lawyers, whose job seemed to be to stand next to a tower of folders of legal correspondence on the saga and enjoy the violence. The joys of the law.