Newcrest gold bug queries just priceless

How, the shareholder wanted to know, do I know the value of my holdings? Picture: Colin Murty/ The Australian

As important as they are, corporate Australia’s annual shareholder meetings have generally stagnated into pretty tedious affairs these days, particularly in the COVID era of webcasts, when a company’s PR team can deselect or pre-sanitise any interesting questions on offer from a boisterous retail shareholder.

But Sandeep Biswas’s Newcrest Mining on Wednesday offered hope for the genre, with the gold bugs out in force after a vast centrist conspiracy delivered the US presidency to Joe Biden.

After a quiet start, with the Australian Shareholders Association delivering its usual earnest, but dull, question on some matter of corporate governance, an offering from a retail shareholder broke through the boredom and brought the slumbering masses to their screens.

How, the shareholder wanted to know, do I know the value of my holdings?

It was a poser for chairman Peter Hay who struggled for a few moments, seemingly trying to see some deep inner meaning in the question before settling on the obvious answer.

Perhaps you could, he suggested, check the Newcrest share price?

Bracketed by more mundane shareholder queries, the Newcrest chairman then faced questions on why the company wasn’t stockpiling all of its gold for when the price shot up in a few months (because it could also go down); whether Newcrest was preparing for the return of the gold standard in the US in 2021 (apparently not); and whether it would consider issuing an EFTPOS card so gold bugs can draw on their bullion savings to (presumably) stockpile shotguns and tinned food.

That idea was not, apparently, an appealing one for the party poopers on the Newcrest board — the likes of Philip Aiken and Roger Higgins.

And why, another shareholder wanted to know, doesn’t Newcrest issue dividends in the form of bullion?

That one was easy for Hay, who dispatched it to the boundary with a flourish.

“The answer is no. The way we now pay dividends, by electronic transfer, would be hard to achieve in relation to sending bullion down the telephone wires,” he said.

So there.

Defending Packer

When it comes to the passion of shareholders, it seems there’s quite the scale — let’s call it nil to James Packer.

As counsel for Packer’s Consolidated Press Holdings, led by Noel Hutley SC, began their spirited defence before Patricia Bergin’s casino inquiry on Wednesday, arguments centred on Packer’s character and suitability to be affiliated with Crown.

Packer was, as submitted by Hutley, just a substantial shareholder, and not at all acting in a shadow director capacity — his countless emails (and ensuing reams of paper for the defence) just in his capacity as adviser, or a measure of his dogged determination for the firm to succeed.

Telling then chairman John Alexander to stop gallivanting around the globe? That was just opposition any other shareholder would have voiced.

As for Alexander’s stated desire to make Packer proud? Well, that’s just down to his deep-set desire for ultimate shareholder good.

It was the question of the motive behind Packer’s comment to Alexander that he make budget “for his own good” though that was “bleeding obvious”, according to Hutley — who said anyone that knew anything about the stockmarket knew that “if a company sets out a budget and doesn’t make it then it will hurt”.

Illustration: Rod Clement

It seems perhaps Hutley has been mixing with a few more vocal shareholders than the likes of Margin Call, and with a different interpretation of vernacular.

Drilling down on an email by Packer to Alexander granting his “blessing”, the defence noted that any blessing, as far as it was concerned, was not a phrase of instruction — “it’s obviously, simply, an everyday observation that people make of encouragement, no more than that”.

Quite the mixed blessing indeed.

Forrest’s fortune

Is there anything Fortescue founder Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest can’t do?

While he made his fortune on his mining prowess, it was the chairman’s green credentials that dominated his presentation to shareholders on Wednesday at its Perth-based AGM, along with his philanthropic ventures with wife Nicola and their Minderoo foundation.

All that while his acquisitive family office Tattarang buys up bootmaker R.M. Williams and opens its latest hospitality venture Cooee at the Old Swan Brewery in Perth last week.

It had one investor questioning just when the cash would run out.

Forrest was quizzed if he had any intention of selling down, especially given his monster $97m purchase of shares in late September (taking his holding to more than 1.116 billion shares for those playing at home).

“I’ve never met a Fortescue share I didn’t love,” Forrest answered via videolink from Paraguay, where he’s been holed up since August and is likely to see out the rest of 2020, along with deputy chief Julie Shuttleworth.

“I will continue my long, boring and predictable path ... I will keep accumulating.”

While the dividends continue to climb and his board peers continue to heap praise upon him it is no wonder.

Deputy chair Mark Barnaba described Forrest as one of Australia’s and the world’s greatest philanthropists, as well as one of the most effective leaders of our generation.

We can’t be sure but despite all those time zones away that’s enough to make even a multi-billionaire blush.

Luring McEwan

Convincing the best of the best to move down under and lead corporate Australia doesn’t come cheap; just ask ASIC.

As Vivienne Thom’s independent inquiry into relocation expenses for ASIC chair James Shipton and his Sydney-dwelling deputy Daniel Crennan continues into its third week, NAB has revealed just how much it forked out to lure Kiwi RBS boss Ross McEwan to lead its bank.

NAB’s Ross McEwan

You see, without the prying eyes of the public purse, NAB was able to dole out almost $270,000 in relocation expenses for McEwan, to cover temporary accommodation, furniture rental, utility costs, dependant travel costs, insurance, stamp duty and other benefits.

That’s almost three times the $118,000 sum that threatens to topple Shipton from his role as top dog at ASIC, albeit his only covered tax advice.

Still, we’ll cut McEwan some slack, having walked into quite the mess thanks to the bank’s previous management under Andrew Thorburn, and after taking a 20 per cent pay cut for six months due to COVID-19.

On the whole, he took home $2.42m for leading the bank since December, with any variable rewards scrapped to “reflect the challenges faced by customers”.

Across the rest of the management team, new starter Andrew Irvine also netted a more moderate relocation expense of $14,000, on top of a $603,000 cash signing bonus, after he jumped ship from Bank of Montreal to head business banking.

His September start date saw Irvine begin duties from hotel quarantine, no doubt an ordeal factored into the final sum.

Defending Packer

Forrest’s fortune

Luring McEwan