Always willing to ham it up for a captive audience, David Williams arrived on stage at The Australian’s Global Food Forum on Friday bearing an oversized ballistic helmet that he promptly secured to his dome – albeit the wrong way around.
It was a necessary measure, Williams joked; he brought the prop because of repeated cannon fire aimed at him in this column over the past fortnight, reporting that sought to magnify his wayward conduct as chair of the listed biotech company, PolyNovo.
No need to rehash the lot of it, but basically we revealed that Williams had been investigated by two barristers over his behaviour, that they recommended he step down as PolyNovo’s chair, and that the board had tried – and failed – to replace him with former Westpac chair Lindsay Maxsted, who then had to school the board on how to properly govern itself. Because apparently the directors had no idea.
“Four days of you kicking the s**t out of me!” Williams cried at the forum’s moderator, Damon Kitney, to much laughter in the audience.
Why not make it five days, shall we?
Earlier this week, Williams spoke to the Fin Review about the disgraces we discovered with PolyNovo’s board. He did so on the same day that the company sacked its CEO, Swami Raote, who had levelled a complaint against Williams’ conduct. It was partially upheld and led to the recommendation that Williams step aside.
But in the wash up between them it was Raote, not Williams, who lost his job. Williams addressed none of these facts in his interview with the Fin, instead claiming he would restore PolyNovo’s plunging market cap to its former highs and recharge its revenue growth to 50 per cent annually — much as Donald Trump, all bluster and BS, used to say he’d build a great wall and have the Mexicans pay for it.
“There has been a sea-change, as a lot of executives will tell you, just since Trump came in. You are seeing people back to the office, forget about diversity. Trump has emboldened a lot of people, but you have got to watch your Ps and Qs.”
Williams never needed the cover of a Trump presidency to behave like a swaggering jackass, but it would be typical of him to misconstrue the vibe shift in America for a social licence to behave like a moron, as he did at a management dinner last year, when he called a senior employee “Ahmed the Terrorist” in front of the PolyNovo leadership.
And how exactly this “sea-change” will revive PolyNovo’s tanking share price is a mystery that only the genius of David Williams appears to be capable of deciphering.
A harder truth is that since Williams’ arrival at PolyNovo in 2014 there’s been minimal to no innovation of the company’s product line. Its ongoing success boils down to a flagship wound-healing solution, NovoSorb BTM, which was developed for burns victims well before Williams had anything to do with the place.
That’s not to suggest Williams hasn’t contributed to BTM’s flourishing through scaling, marketing and investment, but it’s just a fact that he’s coasted off the success of this product while scuppering promising, lucrative growth opportunities with suitable foreign med-techs.
These were opportunities identified by a succession of CEOs, including Raote, all of whom were seeking offramps for the company and shareholders in the face of waning sales and a tapped-out burns market. Williams, for inexplicable reasons, made sure they didn’t happen.
Yet in the Fin he’s pricing in growth while ignoring the stark, unmentioned reality of an almost empty, deal-less pipeline at PolyNovo. “The real question is can we go harder and can we get back to that 50 per cent (revenue growth). I am determined that we can.” Next he’ll tell you he’s determined to take Greenland, as well.
Williams wasn’t kicked off the board for a simple reason: he’s stacked it with his mates and close affiliates.
One of them is Christine Emmanuel-Donnelly, whose brother Jeff Emmanuel was the third largest investor in PolyNovo via his EFM Asset Management. Another is Andrew Lumsden, a director of start-up firm Seminal that Williams chairs and is run by his son. A third is Leon Hoare who, with Emmanuel-Donnelly, is a director of Medical Developments International, which was chaired by Williams until 2023. And last is Robyn Elliott, now double-hatting as PolyNovo’s acting CEO. She goes back with Williams more than a decade to his days chairing IDT Australia, when she was MD of the firm.
The point we’re making is that these people are excessively close to a point reaching incestuousness, such that you can practically hear the twangs of duelling banjoes just reading this paragraph.
Consulting on PolyNovo’s deals, whether they’re scuppered or not, is Kidder Williams, a corporate advisory firm that specialises in agribusiness and food, not biotechs.
It’s the least obvious banker one would select for a medical device company embarking on a capital raise, but it helps that the owner of Kidder Williams happens to be the chairman of the PolyNovo board.
Kidder Williams has conducted three raises for PolyNovo during Williams’ tenure: a $53m raise in 2022; a $23m raise in 2017; and a $13m raise with an $8m acquisition of a minority interest in 2015. The success fees back to Williams, via his firm, wouldn’t have been insubstantial, but Williams wouldn’t comment on that when asked about it on Friday.
Incidentally, Kidder Williams has also found much raising and advisory work at Inoviq, Medical Developments International, IDT Australia, Rate My Agent and Mobile Tyre Shop. No surprise that Williams has either been, or still is, chair of these businesses.
Shareholders at PolyNovo may not have a problem with this potential conflict, or in seeing service fees head to Williams. And maybe they’re not troubled by the lack of independents on board. And perhaps they don’t mind wondering, either, what this board has achieved in the face of squandered supply agreements and promising partnerships, all seemingly frittered away. But if they do, what are they doing about it?
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