Shayne Elliott’s first challenge is to fill his own shoes

ANZ’s can of worms

One of the first challenges for incoming ANZ chief Shayne Elliott will be to replace himself as CFO at the $80 billion bank.

A big job, given ANZ’s Asian operations — something that’s likely keeping Elliott busy given he’s one of three ANZ reps protecting the bank’s quarter interest in Malaysia’s controversial AmBank.

Elliott sits on the AmBank board alongside ANZ’s Aussie boss Mark Whelan and HR leader Suzette Corr.

The $4.5bn bank has been dragged into a vast, complex scandal involving Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund IMDB and $US680m that somehow turned up in 2013 in the AmBank account of PM Najib Razak.

At about 3 per cent of AmBank’s total deposits, this was no doubt a welcome fillip.

As Elliott prowls the corridors of ANZ’s Docklands bunker in search of a new CFO, he might run into one of his old AmBank comrades, Ashok Ramamurthy, a career ANZ banker who’s now back at Melbourne HQ working on “strategic projects”.

After running AmBank for three years, Ramamurthy packed his bags for Melbourne early this year, saying farewell to fellow ANZ secondees Nigel Denby (chief risk officer) and Mandy Simpson (CFO).

Before he was CEO, Ramamurthy spent five years as Ambank CFO, rendering him ably qualified to fill Shayne’s shoes and unlikely to be flustered by any controversy.

MYOB horror returns

The horror that was the proposed $1.35bn sale of Aussie accounting software company MYOB to British giant Sage has returned to haunt the deal’s high-profile advisers.

Sydney private equity outfit Archer Capital hit the Brits with a $186 million claim for breach of contract, after Sage reneged on the mega deal just hours before it was to be signed in August 2011.

But Sydney Federal Court judge Kathleen Farrell, a former Freehills partner, has thrown out the claim by Archer, which was advised in the deal by ex-UBS banker Aiden Allen.

He is now at Citi and mooted as the man most likely to succeed Tony Osmond as the head of investment banking there.

In a lesson for budding deal-makers everywhere, the court found that despite Archer’s claims, no formal agreement had been entered into.

The Brits, advised by Deutsche’s Tim Longstaff, had employed the tactic of lobbing a highball offer for Sage in return for exclusivity and then seeking to shave back the price.

Court docs show Allen was working without a mandate letter from Archer, which later sold MYOB to fellow private equity firm Bain Capital for a smaller $1bn price tag weeks after the Sage offer was pulled.

In her judgment, Farrell highlights the danger of running what she described as Archer’s “full speed” informal sale process for MYOB on a tight time frame and noted that Longstaff and Allen had “committed to an extremely ambitious work plan”.

Farrell also offered an extensive character assessment of Archer partner Andrew Gray, who led the Sage deal — he was “trying too hard” and “self-serving” in the stand, “his evidence often had more to do with conviction than fact”, and was “disinclined to detail” and “sleep-deprived” for much of the time of the negotiations. We await any news of an appeal.

Battered Pav relieved

Also non-binding: a deal struck just before Christmas last year between embattled music mogul Steve Pavlovic and major label Universal to break up their JV, Modular Recordings, following a bitter battle over royalties he allegedly trousered.

Yesterday, as his missus, model Tanja Gacic, posed up a storm in Paris, Pav was agloat on Instagram, posting: “After 12 months of litigation and a shit ton of stress the NSW court of Appeal just ruled in my favour”.

Universal is “disappointed”, but it’s not over, just sent back to the NSW Supreme Court.

Turnbull’s diary full

Along with taking over his office, myki-toting PM Malcolm Turnbull has assumed Tony Abbott’s schedule.

Last night Turnbull was back in Melbourne to headline Enterprise Victoria’s annual dinner at Zinc, introduced by globetrotting Foreign Minister Julie Bishop with Howard-era minister Peter Reith as MC.

Enterprise Victoria, which is co-chaired by Reith and FlexiGroup founder Andrew Abercrombie, is the main fundraiser for Vic Libs, with its website yesterday still boasting Abbott as the prime ministerial talent ... the sort of attention to detail that made former state director Damian Mantach (in) famous.

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