Packer dreaming of all-right Christmas without Mariah Carey
Seven West Media chairman Kerry Stokes is already there, dialling into board hook-ups amid the sex and drugs scandal engulfing his chief executive Tim Worner.
All in the Seven empire agree the mogul is taking a keen interest in the situation.
And about to jet into the Beaver Creek ski resort is newly single Crown Resorts major shareholder James Packer. With 17 Crown employees jailed in China, he was hardly going to holiday in Macau.
Stokes has been something of a father figure to Packer after the death of his media mogul father Kerry Packer more than a decade ago.
Unlike last year, there will be no ex-fiance snow bunny Mariah Carey and her entourage joining them on the slopes.
As the pop diva might say, “All I want for Christmas is …”
The nuclear button
The Tim Worner affair at Seven is becoming stranger than fiction.
The expansive missive sprayed out by the Seven West Media boss’s former lover Amber Harrison to the nation’s journalists and editors on Sunday afternoon had a well-honed journalistic tone.
It read like it was penned by a writer with a sharp nose for news.
Which is exactly what it was.
The lengthy document, sent anonymously via mediastatementdec2016@gmail.com, was the work of Sunday Telegraph columnist Annette Sharp, who we hear had been chasing the Worner-Harrison story for almost two years.
It’s understood senior journalist Sharp, who recently moved across from stablemate The Daily Telegraph, sat down exclusively with Harrison for what became a 2500-plus word expose.
But legal concerns over its content meant that the story sat and sat, Sunday after Sunday, causing the already distressed Harrison much frustration.
Harrison then took matters into her own hands and sent Sharp’s material (with hardly a word changed) directly to media outlets herself, with supporting legal documentation.
In what can only have been a gut-wrenching moment for the reporter, Harrison’s list for the 3.06pm distribution included Sharp herself.
We hear that Harrison got closer to Sharp after Harrison became highly agitated by a piece that appeared in the Fairfax press in March 2015.
The report related to a Seven staffer, who was a direct report to executive Nick Chan. It said the employee was being investigated over more than $200,000 in unauthorised company expenditure. Harrison assumed the piece had been leaked by Seven, which was by then playing hardball against Worner’s former mistress.
It seems to have been one of a few key incidents that led to the moment, this Sunday past, when after years of preparation Harrison went nuclear.
Enter the toe-cutters
Things have been relatively staid over at the third-ranked commercial free-to-air network Ten.
No scandals involving the boss and company executive assistants. No kidnapping operations in the Middle East. Instead, all attention is on the Big Bash cricket competition and the cost-cutting that’s rife across the television business right now.
At Ten’s AGM a fortnight ago, CEO Paul Anderson mentioned a project to review “all costs across the company”.
Leading the toe-cutting exercise, we understand, is McKinsey, Ten’s preferred management consulting firm. Board member Siobhan McKenna — who also sits on the Foxtel board — was a McKinsey partner. The firm was used in the outsourcing of its sales department to Anthony Fitzgerald’s Multi Channel Network last year.
No one much wants to see management consultants at their workplace, especially in the lead-up to Christmas. They are rarely a sign of big bonuses and new hires.
But it could be worse. At least Ten’s HQ in Pyrmont has been free of lawyers from Michael Harmer’s scarlet shop.
Departure lounge
Etihad Aviation Group chief executive James Hogan raised eyebrows across the aviation industry when he revealed in May in this paper that the Abu Dhabi-based airline has started planning for life after his eventual departure from the top job.
Many of those eyebrows raised again yesterday following a report in German business newspaper H andelsblatt that said “multiple independent sources” had told the publication Etihad planned to “remove James Hogan as its chief executive after a failed spree of acquisitions in Europe”.
The Gulf airline’s unhappy expansion into Europe was linked to the departure. The acquisition of a 29 per cent stake in Air Berlin (€477 million in the red in 2015) has been particularly costly.
Etihad was characteristically tightlipped on the subject. “We do not comment on unsubstantiated rumours in the marketplace,” a spokesman for Etihad told us.
One Abu Dhabi-based exec who is soon to depart the airline is corporate affairs boss Michael Venus, who told staff earlier in the year he was on the way out. Venus will finish up at Etihad in the new year.
Less clear is the future of chief financial officer James Rigney, who is close to Hogan. There’s chatter that he might be preparing for a return to his home town Melbourne, although nothing is official. Better chuck it on the growing “unsubstantiated rumour” pile for now.
South for the winter
While many Australian billionaires are heading north for the ski season, some of their American counterparts are chasing the summer.
Eighty-six-year-old billionaire Donald E. Newhouse is going to spend Christmas in Sydney, before watching his son-in-law Joe Mele compete in his first Sydney to Hobart. Mele is racing his yacht Triple Lindy.
Newhouse, along with his brother Samuel “Si” Newhouse, runs the mighty Advance Publications empire, which owns Conde Nast and its titles ranging from The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, and a huge stable of newspapers, such as Newark Star-Ledger, New Orleans Times-Picayune and — our personal favourite — the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
After Chrissie in the Harbour City, the octogenarian billionaire — who was last valued at $15.6 billion — will join Mele after the race for a cruise around Tasmania.
Keep an eye out for him if you’re holidaying on the Apple Isle.
RBA’s renovations bill leaves the US Fed’s in the shade
Donald Trump reckons the Federal Reserve headquarters cost blowout is worth a whinge so can you imagine what he’d say to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s governor, Michele Bullock?
CT co-founder Mark Textor has delete on repeat
It’s buyer’s remorse for the social media age. Mark Textor, the co-founder of lobbying firm CT Group, can’t seem to stop himself typing before scrubbing the offensive posts soon after.
What a Christmas it will be this year in Beaver Creek, Colorado. So much to share if you are an Australian billionaire.