NAB chief Andrew Thorburn faces more bad news

Cartoon: Rod Clement

There was already a whiff of death about Andrew Thorburn.

Now the NAB boss is reeking like a graveyard on a hot day after a flash flood.

Some might think that after the “H-bomb” blew up on Monday afternoon, things couldn’t get worse for the proudest pinstriped banker in the land.

They could.

Lurking in the “known unknowns” column on the crack NAB crisis management team’s list of things that could explode this year is the investigation NSW police are continuing into a multi-million-dollar fraud that was allegedly run out of Thorburn’s NAB.

It’s a situation that has already shamed Thorburn’s chair, Ken Henry, who before his NAB experience was the most respected public servant in the land.

Board documents released by the Hayne royal commission revealed Henry had been questioned about a first-class trip to the US that was booked by Thorburn’s former chief of staff Rosemary Rogers. It’s apparently one of a huge number of extravagant purchases at the centre of the NSW fraud investigation.

Publication of that US trip followed earlier embarrassing details about a Fiji trip Rogers reportedly booked for Thorburn.

Police are investigating whether kickbacks were paid by an external contractor to secure inflated contracts to entertain the bank’s executive team and board.

No charges have been laid against Rogers.

And, to be clear, no one is suggesting Henry or Thorburn did anything wrong.

But should the NSW police press charges on the reported $113 million of corporate travel billed to NAB, it promises excruciating details on banking excess at Kenneth Hayne’s least favourite big four bank.

It could also provide a reason not related to the royal commission (that Henry yesterday reminded the world he championed) for the NAB chair and his boardmates — including two possible successors, Philip Chronican (a hugely respected banker) and Ann Sherry (a former Westpac exec) — to give Thorburn that longed-for second holiday (and then some), which was so spectacularly scuttled by Hayne.

Guthrie wants more

Michelle Guthrie’s audacious unfair dismissal case against the ABC, its former chair Justin Milne and — for whatever, peculiar reason — three of its current board members got under way in the Federal Court yesterday. It’s hard to see how anyone is going to win this one.

Guthrie, who was sacked in August after Milne and his boardmates unanimously decided she was not up to the job, was last year paid a termination payment of towards $1m.

But the former Google exec — who we understand is still on holiday in Japan — is not done yet. At a mediation that Federal Court Justice Jayne Jagot (aka “Triple J”) yesterday requested for April, Guthrie and her legal team are set to argue for more.

The dilemma for the ABC board: how to justify paying more taxpayer funds — a sum of which will have to be disclosed — to a former employee they are only even more convinced was not up to the job?

And the bill doesn’t end there.

A quick scan of Federal Court 18B yesterday suggested considerable legal costs are piling up. Milne is being represented by Swaab’s employment partner, Michael Byrnes, while Milne’s former boardmates investment banker Joseph Gersh, executive coach Donny Walford and Minerals Council of Australia chair Vanessa ­Guthrie have enlisted the services of Ashurst.

That’s in addition to the ABC’s separate legal team from Minter Ellison.

While it’s hard to see a winner, the loser is clear: the Australian taxpayer.

Banks feels at home

Is wannabe independent member for Flinders Julia Banks about to do a Warren Mundine and enact a sea change ahead of the upcoming federal election?

Still Member for Chisholm (but no longer Liberal) Banks, along with her recruiter husband Michael Banks, have amassed an impressive property portfolio in Victoria, with the wealthy couple currently residing in a leafy street in Kelly O’Dwyer’s Higgins.

In fact, former lawyer Banks and her hubbie own four homes in Malvern, a 20-minute drive from her Chisholm office.

But the successful Banks family also has an expansive estate on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula right in the middle of Health Minister Greg Hunt’s electorate of Flinders, which Banks is contesting as an independent candidate.

Banks’ Red Hill South holiday home, which the couple bought more than a decade ago, features a tennis court, pool and orchard and is estimated to be worth more than $2m.

All up, not a bad base from which to run a fierce grassroots campaign seeking to topple the former colleague she holds responsible — and not without reason — for the Turnbull coup.

And it would be a useful way to shore up her local credentials as she battles with Hunt, who lives in Flinders’ Mount Martha.

Hunt and his wife Paula Lindsey paid $2.2m for their historic five-bedroom house in 2013.

Meanwhile, former ALP national president turned star Liberal candidate Warren Mundine on Monday moved his stuff into his new rental in Bomaderry in the marginal NSW south coast seat of Gilmore, after relocating from his former home on Sydney’s north shore.

Gilmore takes in Nowra, Kiama and Batemans Bay and is a key seat — with a margin of just 0.7 per cent — that Labor hopes to win from the Coalition.

Many have written off Mundine’s chances, but it seems the former Labor national president is quite serious about fighting fiercely to defend Gilmore.