More to Myer chair than meets the eye; smouldering tensions at cannabis outfit

JoAnne Stephenson, right, pictured with Paul McClintok, was found moonlighting behind the counter during the Black Friday sales.

Myer chair JoAnne Stephenson sure knows how to drive a side-hustle. On Tuesday we revealed her ownership of a homewares boutique in the regional Victorian town of Daylesford, where she was found moonlighting behind the counter during the Black Friday sales.

That may have surprised some of the department store’s shareholders, given this retail interest has never been declared to investors; the board itself has known about it for years. At least the perceived conflicts of Myer directors Jacquie Naylor and Ari Mervis and CEO John King are made clear enough on the website.

There’s not a word about Stephenson’s shop, eCasa, on her LinkedIn page, and even the store’s website refers cryptically to an owner named “Jo” (Stephenson’s full name can be found in the website’s journal, where almost no one is ever going to bother looking for it).

Myer chair JoAnne Stephenson, working behind the counter on Black Friday at her eCasa store.

But even we were surprised to learn Stephenson’s additional crusts don’t stop with merchandising in candles and body wash. It turns out Ms 56 per cent also pulls in some dosh on the side by using Airbnb to rent the two-bedroom digs located above her eCasa store.

What next? Does she also drive an Uber?

Styled as a “Paris-style apartment”, the pad (“L’atelier Daylesford”) is renting for just under $400 a night in the lead-up to Christmas. Not a bad little earner for Superhost “Joanne”, who’s received almost 200 positive reviews. We assume this is what 56 per cent of shareholders were supporting when they re-elected her as chair earlier this month.

It raises the question of just how Stephenson finds the time for these commitments, given her other, ah, paid duties at the publicly listed Myer, whose board met on 16 occasions in FY22. For those efforts, Stephenson was enriched with $250,000 in compensation.

And that’s in addition to her directorships at Challenger, where she was paid $282,000, and at listed real estate financier Qualitas, where she received $108,000 as an NED. We assume money also changes hands for Stephenson’s role as chair of the Victorian Major Transport Infrastructure Advisory Board, which is overseeing Premier Dan Andrews’ ambitious Big Build.

 

Cannabis calm

The troubles at medicinal cannabis outfit Cronos appear to be settling now that efforts to remove its two leaders were rejected by shareholders.

Resolutions had been put up to banish chief executive Rodney Cocks and executive director Guy Headley from the board but these failed when only 12 per cent of shareholders backed them at Tuesday’s AGM.

The conflict stems from the dismissal of Cronos’s chief medical officer, Ben Jansen, in September over what was later described as a “repeated pattern of inappropriate behaviour, lack of judgment and poor performance”.

Outraged, Jansen’s wife Elizabeth sought to have her husband reinstated, using her own stake as Cronos’ largest shareholder. Alas, she resheathed that weapon after a weekend of peace talks with the company, ending with everyone laying down their arms.

24/07/18 Rodney Cocks is the director and CEO of Cronos Australia. Aaron Francis/The Australian

But that didn’t stop Jansen’s cousin Matua Jansen, with a 9.93 per cent ownership stake, still attempting to remove Cocks and Headley by arguing for a clear separation between the board and the company’s management.

It might have had a shot of getting up if the rest of the Jansen clan backed the proposal; it seems, however, that cousin Ben and wife Elizabeth voted with the board, as the results suggest.

Meanwhile, the former CMO seemed to show up for the AGM in Melbourne but didn’t set foot inside Rialto Towers for the meeting, where the hard questions were put to the board. One of Margin Call’s spies clocked him standing across the street at a coffee shop with his wife and another gentleman.

And that fellow happened to be the only person aside from Matua to ask tough questions during the AGM. From what we hear, he spent a good deal of time taking instructions from his phone, too.

Sedgman’s sorrows

Melbourne fund manager Stephen Sedgman, managing director of Pilgrim Private and Coppin Investment Partners, hasn’t had much luck over the past 12 months. Blame the pandemic, of course!

Investors in Coppin’s Erudition Global Focus Fund, managed by Pilgrim, were told to expect minimum annual returns of 10 per cent over a rolling five-year period. That’s a little optimistic given the fund’s shabby performance of late.

“Over the year to 30 September 2022 the Fund’s return was -26 per cent and over 5 years 5.5 per cent compound per annum,” the quarterly report says. It’s well short of what was suggested, but we doubt anyone at Pilgrim is rushing to hand back their 2 per cent management fee.

Erudition’s quarterly report has also received a curious redesign. No pie charts and tables to clearly display the fund’s performance; clients trying to locate that dreadful -26 per cent figure would have to burrow through some chunky paragraphs to find it.

The shortfalls have largely been blamed on the Covid-19 pandemic, with Sedgman and the Erudition board spelling that out in the pages of the fund’s financial report, which reveals losses for unit holders and nil distributions.

That’s not so good for Sedgman, either. He happens to be a shareholder in the fund. He’s also a shareholder in Pilgrim Private and the trustee, Coppin Investment Partners.

That’s not a bad way to incentivise performance but could create some difficulties were one to try switch up the investment manager. One trigger for review lists a “material deviation from the benchmark of the fund”.

Given his various positions and stakes, if Erudition decided to change managers that would seemingly require Sedgman to sack himself.