Senate pitbulls Deborah O’Neill from the ALP and the Greens’ Barbara Pocock will be in bed early Thursday night ahead of their next appearance mauling mere servants of the financial sector, both private and public alike, in Canberra on Friday.
The pair’s high-profile committee work will see them take on a cast of mere mortals from the corporate regulator, of which there’s really only a couple we are interested in – ASIC chair Joe Longo and allegedly potty-mouthed deputy Karen Chester.
O’Neill, as chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services, which has oversight of ASIC, and her other committee colleague Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg would do well to probe Chester for more details concerning an internal investigation, further exposed by our colleague David Ross,concerning Chester’s work and travel expenses in 2021.
Chester’s old bosses, former chair James Shipton and his then deputy Daniel Crennan, left the corporate watchdog in the wake of their own issues with expenses, which resulted in Chester being front and centre as a candidate to move up the greasy pole. Bragg has been seeking details of the Chester investigation for most of this year and is unlikely to be silent come Friday.
We hope Chester comes prepared.
On the matter of PwC
Never has such Canberra committee work grabbed so many headlines. Deb O’Neill and Barbara Pocock will also get a chance to probe Joe Longo and his underlings on what progress they might have made in their own investigations concerning the international tax scandal still unfolding at PwC Australia.
When the committee last met in late June, ASIC, then represented by another deputy chair Sarah Court, was smashed by the senators over what they saw as the watchdog’s inaction on the matter.
This was despite that the whole affair really had very little to do with the corporate regulator’s actual jurisdiction, primarily concerned with the Corporations Act, and that the Tax Practitioners Board had spent years already probing the matter.
Court promised the committee that ASIC would go away and assess what it could investigate, most likely whether former PwC partner Peter Collins, the accountant at the centre of the whole affair, would be allowed to be “an authorised representative or able to provide financial services under an Australian financial services licence”.
That was despite the fact Collins isn’t authorised to do that anyway, with Court supposing the watchdog could possibly ban him from doing it in the future – even if he had no intention of being a licensee. At least then ASIC could say it did something.
The test is all about whether Collins is “fit and proper”, but the TPB have already concluded he was not unfit, so where ASIC lands will be interesting.
Court told the senators in June ASIC wanted to “move quickly” on the matter, but recognised Collins had “a right to be heard through that process” – that would be hard given there is also a federal police investigation also underway.
Given the pressure from the parliament to be seen to act, we wonder what ASIC will come up with, what rigour it was able to apply to any process and whether Collins was able to participate.
ASIC wouldn’t want people to think it was just window dressing.
Burrowes to be back
Indeed, both old and new PwC Australia executives can’t seem to stay out of the limelight.
New local boss Kevin Burrowes took a pounding before Senate estimates last week after he turned up unable to satisfactorily answer some of the committee’s questions on the tax affair.
Looks like Burrowes, who was imported to Oz from the firm’s Singapore operation with a key brief to try and keep the crisis local, is going to get another chance to face the firing squad. Another day of public hearings for the Senate committee’s investigation into the work of consultants has been scheduled for November 9, with the hot money on Burrowes being recalled to have another crack.
Perhaps the new boss could reach out to old PwC Oz boss Luke Sayers for some tips, with Sayers’ solid and assured performance before the committee in stark contrast to that of Burrowes. As Sayers proved, some prep work with experts never goes astray.
Second time lucky
Melbourne’s billionaire Hains clan is having another crack at selling the family’s Albany Rd mansion following the death in January of patriarch David Hains.
The family, whose wealth is estimated to be in the range of $3b, first tried selling the 10-bedroom mansion in February, seeking buyers prepared to offer in the range of $40m to $45m.
That sort of moolah would make you a neighbour to the likes of billionaires Lindsay Fox, Solly Lew and John Gandel, as well as secure more than 3600 sqm of prime Toorak.
But alas no takers.
Hains passed away aged 92, with his Portland House Group now run by his eldest son, Stephen Hains.
He’s a realist, having agreed to drop the indicative price range for the estate – previously the home of newspaper magnate Sir Keith Murdoch, the father of News Corp executive chairman Rupert Murdoch – down to $39m to $42.5m for the second-time-round campaign.
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