Stokes unaware of BRS Bali break; In-a-spin PwC brings in another talking head
Ben Roberts-Smith hardly looked a picture of serenity as he sank into a poolside sun-bed at a Bali resort on Wednesday.
Duly papped by a television crew, Margin Call could only wonder if Kerry Stokes had encouraged or even financially aided the disgraced former war hero to skip town. After all, the mogul has paid for literally everything else up to this point.
But we hear Camp Stokes was none too happy at the sight of BRS at the $500-a-night resort in his budgies, and most certainly did not fund a red cent of the flight and accommodation.
They weren’t even aware of it, we hear.
It helps explain part of Stokes’s response to the media on Thursday, in which the billionaire said that he hadn’t “a chance to have a discussion with Ben as yet, but I will when he has had a chance to fully absorb the judgment”.
Which sounds like a subtle suggestion that BRS better didi mao home if he wants any appeal to be funded.
Spin doctors galore
PwC’s obsessive recruitment of spin doctors and strategists continues unabated, even though management don’t seem to be heeding their advice – or so goes the murmuring back to Margin Call from the nether regions of the death star.
In addition to hiring former Gladys Berejiklian staffer Sean Berry to hand-hold the acting CEO, Kristin Stubbins, it looks like the firm has also employed former Labor staffer-turned-lobbyist Alex Cramb.
That’s not a bad move, considering Cramb worked for years as a spinner to Anthony Albanese before he became prime minister.
Cramb left the PMO not long after Labor’s election in May, his plan having been to grow grapes and run some sheep and goats around a farm he bought in Gippsland. That lasted all of five minutes, evidently.
Hiring Cramb makes sense. It’s another line of communication into government now that Colbourne Advisory’s Andrew Thomas (formerly an adviser to Bill Shorten) has decided to step back from his work with PwC. That leaves the John Brenton-led TG Public Affairs and its chairman Stephen Conroy to manage the PwC dumpster fire.
But why feel sorry for them? We hear TG is being paid rather handsomely for its month-to-month services. It’s not quite the $200,000 that’s being widely rumoured but more likely to be between $50,000-$100,000, according to our well-informed estimate.
One would think PwC’s management might cling to every suggestion, every scrap of advice offered up. And yet Margin Call understands the PwC brass have been excruciatingly slow and even hesitant on the uptake.
It brings to mind the double-edged sword facing Stubbs in this instance. On the one hand she’s under immense pressure to send dozens of partners to the wall over the tax leaks scandal and, in particular, to name names, as everyone from the Prime Minister down has been calling for.
On the other hand, it’s the vote of partners, and those of their allies, that will eventually decide whether she’ll stay on permanently as CEO.
Change of tune
Margin Call reported a peculiar turn of events in the Federal Court on Wednesday, in a case between former ANZ trader Etienne Alexiou and the bank that once employed him.
Alexiou claims that he was unfairly dropped by ANZ over an interest rate rigging scandal that ended up in a costly settlement with the corporate regulator. It’s Alexiou’s contention that he was made the fall-guy over the matter.
The hearings have veered down a strange path of how both sides might have used journalists to amplify their case in the media.
It’s partly why ANZ’s lawyers applied to the court on Wednesday to have Alexiou hand over any correspondence that he might have had with journalists dating as far back as 2014. The application was rejected but Justice Nye Perram encouraged ANZ’s lawyers to think about amending their defence and trying a second time. None of which boded well for any journalists who might have been named in any correspondence, as we noted on Thursday. But now we hear ANZ is backing right away from that avenue of inquiry, essentially dropping its pursuit of any journalistic correspondence altogether.
From what we hear, an overzealous lawyer might have been too quick on their feet to seek out the documents, for it didn’t go down too well once Margin Call brought it to the bank’s attention.
A-plus for intrigue
Dairy company A2 Milk is beginning to look like a finishing school for boardroom coups, isn’t it?
Presumably that’s why its executives keep emerging in failed corporate putsches.
Most recently there was Peter Nathan, A2’s former Asia-Pacific boss, who turned up this week alongside Bubs co-founder Kristy Carr pushing to spill the board and install himself as CEO. That’s after Carr was unceremoniously dumped from the company by its wily chair Katrina Rathie, barely a month after she was appointed.
And this all just six months after former A2 marketing boss Susan Massasso joined Alexander Abrahams to try to roll the board of Pacific Smiles, the ASX-listed dental group that Abrahams co-founded. Institutional investors weren’t having a bar of that and it failed, of course.
Should we expect similar plays from some of the other recent A2 departures? US boss Blake Waltrip left the company last month after a seven-year stint, as did Bernard May, who led A2 subsidiary Mataura Valley Milk. And let’s not forget chief operations officer Shareef Khan who quit late last year.
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