PolyNovo chair David Williams pushed to resign; Adrian Portelli posts about being sick from oysters day before court hearing

PolyNovo has engaged hotshot Melbourne barristers to investigate a slew of allegations concerning David Williams’ conduct. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

Renowned Melbourne deal-maker David Williams has always been loud of mouth, unafraid of giving offence.

Just last year he gave a keynote address to the Melbourne Bionics Institute, delivering an Acknowledgement of Country where he referred to Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart as the traditional owners of the land.

Still in front of the microphone, Williams went on to tell a racy anecdote about his entree to clinical research: it involved a woman he liked at his university conducting a study into sexual arousal.

So mortified was the institute’s chief executive at hearing all this that he sent an apology to attendees the following day, calling Williams’ speech disrespectful. Williams found the whole thing amusing, aware that he’s always upsetting someone.

But it seems his behaviour and bawdy sense of humour might have finally put his job at risk inside PolyNovo, the listed burns treatment company that he’s chaired since 2014.

Deeply under wraps until now – even as PolyNovo posted its half-year results last week – was the fact that the company engaged hotshot Melbourne barrister Philip Crutchfield KC and Katherine Brazenor in October last year to investigate a slew of allegations concerning Williams’ conduct.

Among them were claims of bullying against PolyNovo CEO Swami Raote and chief financial officer Jan Gielen, and other allegations, including an off-colour remark made at a board and senior management dinner held the night after PolyNovo’s AGM.

We are impeccably informed that Crutchfield and Brazenor recommended to PolyNovo that Williams step aside as chair. Picture: Glenn Hunt

At the dinner, Williams is alleged to have introduced a team member named Ahmed as “Ahmed the Terrorist”, which Williams told us was a lighthearted reference to a famous bit by ventriloquist-comedian Jeff Dunham.

“Ahmed is a friend who I have known for many years and Ahmed the Terrorist is a ventriloquist puppet. I was responsible for getting him the job at PolyNovo and after the dinner and my speech he came and hugged me for all to see,” Williams said

Williams went on to make further remarks denying any investigation had occurred, comments which fly in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.

“The board did not commission any report and no report was produced,” Williams said. “There was no investigation.”

Oh, but there was an investigation, David.

Crutchfield and Brazenor literally sat down and interviewed a swag of leadership figures at Poly­Novo about you. The barristers delivered recommendations.

Trying to hide under the blankets and pretend none of this ever happened is both bizarre and incredibly misleading – to our readers and the market.

We don’t know how many of the allegations were sustained against Williams but we are impeccably informed that Crutchfield and Brazenor recommended to PolyNovo that he step aside as chair.

The company accepted this recommendation, searched for a replacement, but the transition evidently hasn’t ­occurred.

Was the strategy to wait for a positive earnings announcement before dropping this unpalatable piece of news?

February’s half-year results might have been the most appropriate time, except profits after tax came in below expectation, tanking the share price.

Fast and loose

Billionaire Adrian Portelliappeared in a Melbourne magistrates court on Tuesday to answer charges of hooning in a Mercedes C63.

Except he didn’t really appear at all; he just showed his face via video-link for a couple of unsatisfying minutes while the video connection cut out intermittently – and that was only after a compromise was brokered between Portelli’s barrister, Penny Marcou, and the prosecutor over whether he had to appear.

Marcou tendered a letter from Portelli’s GP claiming it would be “highly undesirable” for the rich-lister to physically attend court.

Portelli with his new clean shaven look. Picture: Instagram

Portelli’s social media post.

Prosecutor Alex Turner said that was hardly a sufficient explanation. The GP’s letter barely specified the nature of the illness. The solution was to have Portelli dial in, even though the state of his illness remained a mystery.

And yet a cursory geez of his Instagram account, which is wide open, would have cracked the case very quickly.

There he was, 24 hours earlier, posting an image of himself supine and fragile on a chaise longue with a drip in his arm, his living room like a makeshift medical clinic with people fussing all around him.

“Never eating oysters again,” moaned the caption. “4 weeks on and still not right.”

Four weeks from a bad oyster? Riiight.

Doctor Google tells us that the most rancid of them will lay you out for a week, tops, not a whole month – a big fat fib to the Victorian legal system, on the other hand, will send you straight to ­Jahannam.

Sounds to us like Lambo Guy – fresh from a summer controversy of trying to change his “Lambo Guy” moniker – just didn’t want to brave a media scrum.

Row over Rowe’s star

Fans of award-winning cartoonist David Rowe will be familiar with his frightfully ornate caricatures, be they RBA governor Michele Bullock flogging the bones of a dead horse, or Donald Trump reimagined as Jabba the Hutt, the corpulent Tatooine gangster. Galleries of these images can be scrolled through and admired on the Fin Review’s website.

Except for one particular illustration of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu that seems to be missing from the November gallery. Taken down, it would seem, like so many Iranian nuclear ­scientists.

This particular cartoon was featured in the print and online editions of the newspaper during the weekend of November 23.

Illustration of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu by David Rowe.

Both versions depicted Netanyahu in the style of a police mugshot, with an inset image of a bloodied fingerprint and the wall behind him tallying not height but the number of casualties from the war in Gaza – nearly 60,000 on Rowe’s estimate. Not unlike Gaza’s Ministry of Health, Rowe doesn’t appear to distinguish between civilians and terrorist ­combatants.

But there’s a discrepancy between the printed and digital versions of the artwork – a Star of David in the centre of Netanyahu’s tie is visible in the online edition and straight-up missing from the printed copy. So what’s ­happened?

Neither Rowe nor the AFR replied to our inquiries, but we hear an editor caught sight of the Star of David – a symbol of Jewish identity – during an early draft of the work and suggested it be scrubbed before publication.

We presume this editor saw no point in suggesting that all Jews, everywhere, share blood on their hands for the war in the Middle East, as Rowe was suggesting of Bibi. As to how the original image ended up online for us to find, well that was a production error, apparently. The only bit we can’t explain is why the revised toon was removed from the AFR’s monthly gallery of Rowe’s work.