Spooked by scandal, Sayers Group loses Scurrah; Wakefield Evans seeks another Macquarie tilt

Luke Sayers’ consulting firm has lost some key personnel. Picture: Ian Currie

By all accounts, Luke Sayers is still meandering about in Italy after celebrating his wife’s 50th birthday, and we can’t say that we blame him given the line of paps just waiting to bosh him on arrival at Tullamarine.

But staying abroad has its shortcomings and, while Sayers hasn’t been fingered for any wrongdoing at PwC during its, ah, troubles, the fallout is beginning to seep into the operations of his consulting firm.

Margin Call has learned that Sayers Group partner Nicole Scurrah, the wife of former Virgin CEO Paul Scurrah, has walked out on the company in recent days owing to the PwC crisis, leaving behind equity and taking up to 10 employees in the Queensland office with her.

The plan is to start her own operation and we hear that work is well under way.

Apparently Scurrah had been unsatisfied for some months with the reputational inconveniences trailing Sayers as a result of the fiasco afflicting PwC, where he was its CEO between 2012 and 2020. “Collateral damage” was the word being thrown around on Wednesday, as well as a suggestion that it wasn’t her first attempt at a resignation since the scandal broke.

Nicole and Paul Scurrah. Picture: Mark Cranitch

Plans were discussed with the Sayers management team to try to assuage her concerns, but the negotiations didn’t work out. Neither side replied to Margin Call’s requests for comment.

It was Sayers who hand-picked Scurrah out of PwC where she worked as a contractor, recruiting her to the Sayers Group when it was founded in 2020.

She went on to establish its infrastructure and major projects unit and led the division until her resignation.

Wasting no time, we hear they’ve already appointed partner Tom Considine to take over her role.

No shock either that Scurrah’s profile has disappeared from the website in what looks to be record time, and it would seem her commitment to distancing herself from PwC is damn serious, too, with all mentions of the accounting firm now scrubbed from her LinkedIn profile.

It’s far more difficult, however, to scrub Queensland Hansard records, where Scurrah is mentioned on several occasions for the slightly untidy matter of providing free hospitality to MPs who holidayed in Whistler, Canada, where she and her husband own an apartment.

At the time she was working for PwC as a government consultant, hired to investigate – of all things – ways and means of cutting spending on consultants!

School’s out

Macquarie Group’s AGM is a month away and, for the hypocrisy, it’s a delight to discover that board director Nicola Wakefield Evans is putting herself up for another three-year term.

Wakefield Evans joined the Macquarie board in 2014, meaning she’s hit the nine-year limit for non-executive directors.

To overcome that, the board has to consider her further service to be of significant benefit to the organisation. And that may well be the case. But directors overstaying their welcome on boards has been an issue quite dear to the heart of Wakefield Evans in the recent past, or at least when it suited her, and there’s no greater example of that than during her war with Cranbrook School last year.

Rather than recap it all (it was anticlimactic, at best) we’ll just say this: Wakefield Evans ran a chaotic proxy battle against the re-election of certain school councillors on behalf of Bubs Australia chair Katrina Rathie.

The trigger for doing so was an irreconcilable breakdown in relations between the school headmaster, Nicholas Sampson, and the president, Jon North, but there were other reasons: the supposedly sluggish pace of the school’s conversion to a coeducational facility, and Rathie’s great coveting of North’s job and control of the council.

Nicola Wakefield Evans is seeking to extend her term on the Macquarie Group board. Picture: John Feder

Thankfully, Rathie didn’t succeed on that final score. One need only to look at the catastrophic mess that’s become of governance at Bubs Australia to understand how Rathie likes to wield power when it’s bestowed upon her.

To justify the coup, Wakefield Evans emailed parents ahead of the AGM arguing for a rewrite of the school’s constitution. Entirely at odds with what she’s seeking at Macquarie, she argued for councillor terms to be limited to a maximum of nine years (instead of 12) and with no opportunity for extensions of the kind that North and others had enjoyed – and which she now herself is seeking.

Lawyers were hired, letters were fired, and threats to file an oppression case against the school were mobilised to pry the council loose and shake out its leadership.

Those threats were filed on behalf of Wakefield Evans, Warwick Negus, Will Vicars and Angus Dawson.

The conclusion, one of the most unsatisfactory in recent scandals, resulted in the entire school council spontaneously resigning (except for Rathie) and fresh blood appointed shortly thereafter.

Sadly, Rathie’s pitch to assume the vacant role of school president – pretty much the whole point of the exercise – failed for a second time. A previous attempt in 2020 was similarly unsuccessful.

Macquarie shareholders may not need to be as wary of Wakefield Evans, a career lawyer, if she’s elected to remain for another three years, although apparently she’s told the board that she will only stay until 2024. No mention of that in the notice of meeting!

We hear Wakefield Evans has harboured lofty ambitions to chair the board and threw in her name when Peter Warne retired. Instead, the bank chose former Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens. We asked Wakefield Evans for comment but heard nothing back.

Image reboot

Margin Call posed the question on Wednesday of how former Oil Search CEO Keiran Wulff ended up in an internal Santos brochure wearing the company’s branded clothing.

It might have made sense if Wulff had remained in play for Santos’ acquisition of Oil Search in 2021, except Wulff had been dogged by bullying allegations and had already resigned (on medical grounds) well before the deal had been signed.

Thus our confusion at the sight of the former CEO in a Santos beanie in an arctic landscape seemingly admiring something off-camera that the company had achieved.

Keiran Wulff’s image was used “in error”.

We asked whether Wulff had been hired by Santos and it appears that’s not the case. So what the hell was he doing in the document?

“Keiran Wulff is not employed by Santos,” a spokeswoman said. “The image was used in error in an internal document and is no longer being used.”

Which can only mean – unless a more worthy explanation eludes us – that an old Oil Search picture had been fished out of the archives and doctored with a Santos logo. Cheeky!