Break out the popcorn for what many are speculating will be Kelly Bayer Rosmarin’s swan song as Optus chief executive when she fronts a Senate hearing on Friday into last week’s catastrophic Optus network outage.
If she bombs, it won’t be from lack of assistance, with Optus having engaged myriad consultants to assist its handling of the recent outage and before that the cyber attack a bit over a year ago. Arguably, not that it shows.
To assist in her preparations to front the committee hearing, which will be chaired from 9am by Greens Senator Sarah Hanson Young, Margin Call hears that Bayer Rosmarin has been working with corporate communications and business consultancy Bastion Reputation. Managing director Clare Gleghorn and consultant Tess Salmon have been working closely to make sure the Optus CEO is overprepared when she steps into the fire. Gleghorn was contacted for comment, but did not respond.
By Bayer Rosmarin’s side fronting what has been scheduled to be a two-hour hearing will be Optus’s MD of networks Lambo Kanagaratnam, who’s only been in that job since August. What could possibly go wrong?
As per form to date, there will be no appearances from local representatives on parent Singtel’s board – former Westpac boss Gail Kelly and her good mate John Arthur, who was general counsel during her reign at the bank.
Neither have said boo about last year’s hack nor last week’s outage (which stemmed from Singtel) despite what both events have exposed about the vulnerability of a critical piece of Australia’s infrastructure.
Bayer Rosmarin is understood to be planning to make an opening statement to the hearing, while Optus has also made a submission to the inquiry.
Also assisting the telco in the wake of last week’s fresh crisis has been TG Public Affairs, where former Labor communications minister Stephen Conroy is chairman. We note Conroy has now been involved in advising behind the scenes of Australia’s two biggest and messiest corporate crises this year – Optus and PwC.
Also recently in the door for Optus to assist with relations in Canberra is actor turned lobbyist Greg Rudd, brother of former ALP prime minister and now Australian ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd.
The local Rudd, who did not respond to inquiries from Margin Call, is working for Optus via his Making the World a Better Place Pty Ltd outfit.
Taxing times
The battle to own Origin Energy by private equity firms EIG and Brookfield is at the pointy end, with AustralianSuper standing firm against the $20bn deal.
The offer’s scheme will be voted on by shareholders on November 23, so all sides are mobilising to the finish line.
Latest to the fray (via Nine’s AFR) is former Origin director Teresa Engelhard, who this week told readers why she’d be voting “no” to the takeover bid.
Engelhard, who was a director of Origin for just over three years ending in October 2020 and is still on the board of WiseTech Global, doesn’t like the involvement in the deal of what she describes as a “Bermudan tax shelter”. She says “paying taxes isn’t so bad”.
Funny, her husband is energy and climate investor Ivor Frischknecht, a former boss of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, who is now a managing partner with Sosteneo Infrastructure Partners. Sosteneo is registered in the European tax haven of Luxembourg, which might make for some awkward pillow talk between the power couple on the subject of corporate tax minimisation.
Engelhard is also against the Origin deal because she says it will concentrate more wealth with PE firms and sophisticated investors and away from long-term investors like her at a time when there is already growing economic inequality.
Worthy stuff.
But during Engelhard’s time on the board at Origin the company’s share price declined by more than 40 per cent, which amounted to a destruction in shareholder value of more than a $4bn.
She’s not the only one to blame, but surely she has to be considered a fairly decent wedge standing between retail shareholders and wealth creation?
These days, Engelhard bills herself as CEO and founder of what she describes as an “edtech” or “stealth-stage start-up” outfit called StickyTek. Sounds good, but we’re not sure that qualifies her to make the sort of detailed analysis of the valuation of Origin’s 20 per cent stake in private retail energy tech disrupter Octopus Energy that she does in her op ed piece.
As far as we can tell from StickyTek’s own material, its product is a “physical toy aimed at enriching the lives of children through hands-on play and tactile learning”.
“The product uses a combination of blocks, figurines, and stickers to give children a strictly ‘hands on, screens off’ approach to learning,” the blurb continues. Doesn’t sound very “tech”, right?
Call us harsh, but please.
Home sweet Hume
It’s a tricky time to be trying to sell the family home.
Interest rates have just gone up and are predicted to go up again, potentially early in the new year as new Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock seeks to do her bit to rein in inflation. The cash rate is sitting at 4.35 per cent, a 12-year high.
But the ever reliable federal opposition spokeswoman for finance, Jane Hume, is having a crack at selling up anyway, this week listing her Malvern townhouse for sale.
Hume, who has three children, has called the three-bedder on a busy road home since purchasing it for $2m in February 2017, not long after she was elected as a senator for Victoria the year before.
Only problem is, despite Hume’s pre-parliament credentials as an exec with financial giants including Deutsche Bank and Australian Super, there seems to have been little uplift in the value of her home in the almost seven years she’s held it. The price range for the sale is $1.9m-$2.09m, at which it seems Hume won’t even cover her costs.
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