A year since PwC was jeered and snubbed out of sponsoring any major corporate events – thanks to the small matter of an international tax scandal – we now hear the firm is finally attempting to dip a toe back in the marketing waters.
There used to be a routine sponsorship arrangement between PwC and CEDA, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, but it’s been on hold since May last year when the PwC crisis reached its zenith and when the firm was practically urged to drop its name from major events (lest the PwC logo foul up the gigs with its whiff of scandal). “We have no sponsorship arrangements planned with them,” a CEDA spokeswoman told us when we inquired this week.
Ah, but this is not quite the full story. Furtive efforts by PwC to seek naming rights at luncheons and dinners and speeches have certainly begun. We hear a senior associate at PwC met with a CEDA representative and flicked through a calendar of upcoming events to see what opportunities might arise for the firm to put its name to, this being an informal meeting and the discussion purely speculative, involving a single PwC emissary rather than a team of actual decision-makers. And while, yes, that might suggest the discussions weren’t particularly serious, we would argue that that’s exactly what we’d expect from a firm tentatively, and very discreetly, hoping to test the market appetite for a revival of its battered brand.
Well, it didn’t work out very well anyway. What was floated as a potential sponsorship opportunity during the meeting was an upcoming talk on tax reform, of all topics, which CEDA promptly declined for obvious reasons. PwC sponsoring a tax event? It’s as outrageous and unsettling as a mermaid on a mountaintop (if we may borrow a gem from James Baldwin). Per the CEDA spokeswoman again: “The topic of sponsorship does sometimes arise in these meetings, as it did briefly in a recent meeting with PwC. It was not pursued by either party.”
Yeah, no s..t.
Screen screams
One person supposed to be speaking at that very tax event will be teal independent Allegra Spender, who caused a few raised brows at a recent screening in Sydney of Screams Before Silence, the documentary film led by Facebook’s former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Spender showed up for the pre-drinks and photographs but couldn’t be found once the lights came up on the film itself, leading some to suspect her heart wasn’t truly in the event.
Au contraire. Turns out Spender had flagged an existing commitment with the organisers well before the screening itself and asked them if it would still be fine to attend and show support (and, yes, have a picture taken).
As Spender told Margin Call: “I watched the film the night before and met with one of the main witnesses featured in the film two days later who told me of his harrowing experiences first-hand. The reality is I can’t attend every important event in my community, but I take this issue extremely seriously.”
Fair enough, really. Actually, it’s worth noting that Spender was the only MP who attended the event at all, and you best believe quite a large number of politicians were invited.
Not so neighbourly
Not a word out of former Star Entertainment CFO Harry Theodore since he resigned from the casino group in May 2022, this at a time when allegations of impropriety were being ventilated daily at an inquiry into money laundering and criminality at its Sydney gaming hub. Theodore vanished from dozens of Star boards in the days following his exit and has neither registered a fresh one nor done any tinkering with his LinkedIn profile since.
That said, we spied an unlikely listing in the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal suggesting he’s in the midst of an inconvenience with a neighbour in Sydney’s Hunter’s Hill, the case having been brought by Eleanor Theodore, who couldn’t be reached. The defendant in the matter is one Margaret Frangos-Young, who spoke of a healthy respect for journalism when contacted by Margin Call but declined to comment in any capacity. Either way, we’re led to believe the dispute comes down to much more than just a barking dog. It debuts at the tribunal this week.
Case closed
Nearly 10 years after he was charged by police, former CBA technology executive Jon Waldron was finally found guilty by judge Phillip Mahony in the District Court this week for the crime of participating in a multimillion-dollar bribery and kickback scheme.
Waldron, the bank’s GM of IT engineering, led a scheme with his EGM Keith Hunter where they’d be personally rewarded for buying $10.5m of IT software from US company ServiceMesh, run by Eric Pulier. Hunter pleaded guilty and served a sentence of just over two years, but Waldron’s case dragged on for almost a decade, during which time he faced charges in the US with Pulier but which a grand jury dropped in 2018. All up, Hunter and Waldron were said to have accepted bribes totalling $US2.5m.
Waldron is scheduled for sentencing in August.
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