PwC’s fight with Neil Fuller back in court

Under-siege and rapidly shrinking professional services firm PwC will be back in court in Sydney on Friday in its unfolding legal fight with former partner Neil Fuller.

Fuller, who retired from the practice in 2019 in circumstances said to have been entirely unrelated to the firm’s still unfolding international tax scandal, has taken legal action against his old shop over what we understand to be his lucrative retirement benefits.

These benefits were severed after the scandal exploded at the start of this year onto the front pages and broadcast bulletins of the mainstream press.

Lawyers for both sides will gather in the District Court for a confidential pre-trial conference on Friday, where they will seek to potentially work out a solution to the dispute.

We first told you of Fuller’s action in August. Margin Call hears Fuller’s benefit could be in the ballpark of $400,000 annually. Payments fluctuate depending on the firm’s overall profitability – clearly the future is not looking as bright as it once was.

Why do we care about Fuller? Inside the firm he was known as a “rover”, with instructions to focus “on the North American market”, according to a 144-page email dossier from PwC on the tax scandal released by the Senate.

It was Fuller who took opportunities that arose from the Australian practice and marketed them into the PwC global network.

The firm in Australia is now led by Kevin Burrowes and he has assured stakeholders the tax affair did not extend to PwC’s international operations. A report by law firm Linklaters has cleared overseas partners of using confidential information related to the tax leaks scandal, although PwC has refused to release that report.

Meanwhile, the 330 redundancies announced by the firm this week will mean significant change for former federal Liberal member for Mayo in South ­Australia and one-time minister Jamie Briggs, who for almost the past four years has been managing partner of PwC in the state.

Briggs has just moved across to government business spin-off Scyne Advisory in a new role as “corporate affairs leader”.

That news did elicit the odd chortle in the vicinity of this desk, with Briggs renowned in his time in the parliament (before his fall from grace following a late-night incident in Hong Kong) for his robust interactions with the fourth estate.

Walkley withdrawal

It’s now getting close to a year since the PwC tax scandal exploded into the public realm and still the much diminished firm under boss Kevin Burrowes is navigating precarious terrain.

The professional services practice has for some time been a sponsor of the high-profile Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism, an awkward position given reportage of the firm’s misdeeds in its international tax practice are front and centre in many of this year’s award categories.

Cocktails and canapes under the circumstances do seem inappropriate for PwC’s Sydney office. Picture: Damian Shaw/NCA NewsWire

The gongs are set to be handed out at a gala dinner at the International Convention and Exhibition Centre in Sydney on November 23.

Margin Call hears PwC management has just taken the decision to donate the table for 10 that it gets at the awards as part of its sponsorship package to representatives from First Nations media groups, relieving PwC execs and their guests from the torture of sitting through the evening’s proceedings.

The spectre of the tax scandal and its impact on PwC operations hangs over the wider festive season at the firm too.

We hear that all former local partners of the shrinking operation were on Wednesday informed that their usual Christmas knees-up at a fancy hotel would not be held this year in light of the redundancies announced this week. Cocktails and canapes under the circumstances do seem inappropriate.

Other Christmas celebrations at the firm, we understand, will still go ahead, but in a much more muted form.

WhatsAppened?

You know there’s serious trouble when the chief executive of the nation’s largest telco can’t conduct a phone interview without the help of Meta.

Kelly Bayer Rosmarin had a big day on Wednesday when her telco, which counts about one third of the nation as customers, suffered a major outage, rendering businesses unable to transact, hospitals unable to receive calls and even stopping government services in their tracks.

It also left Bayer Rosmarin without the ability to send a text or receive a call, and when she joined an ABC Sydney radio interview towards lunch, she did so via WhatsApp.

That move in itself shows us the outage affected those even at the highest levels at Optus.

But the question we’re all really asking is: how did she get online? Who provided the Wi-Fi? Was it one of Optus’s biggest rivals Telstra or TPG?

Watchdog nobbled

Optus is corporate watchdog ASIC’s provider of mobile services.

On Wednesday there was a whole cohort of ASIC employees across Australia, many of whom were working from home, who couldn’t use their phones due to the national outage. Perfect day, then, for corporate crims to get amongst it with the corporate operator nobbled thanks to Bayer Rosmarin.

The contract is set to expire in March next year, so government types are starting to turn their minds to a fresh tender process, which we understand will form part of a wider whole of government deal in the hands of Finance Minister Katy Gallagher’s Department of Finance.

Unfortunate then that Communications Minister Michelle Rowland was so clearly frustrated at the telco’s handling of what was being described as the biggest outage in Australian history, which followed the devastating September 2022 cyberattack on the company.

“Consumers will be making judgments about the quality of service they receive in a competitive market,” Rowland predicted as the day unfolded.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil’s not much a fan of the No.2 market player either.

It’s a shame Optus’s newly appointed managing director of marketing and corporate affairs, Danielle Keighery, who is still under contract to Crown Resorts, can’t start early still. Bayer Rosmarin really could use all the help she can get at this stage.

Keighery was at Flemington on Saturday enjoying proceedings in the Birdcage at Crown and at Herald Sun House, clearly enjoying some downtime before she enters the SingTel-owned Aussie telco’s crisis centre.