Surprise guests from Elliott Management lost for words

Illustration: Rod Clement

Paul Keating wasn’t the only unannounced guest at the lunch to honour departing BHP chairman Jac “The Knife” Nasser.

Billionaire Paul Singer sent lieutenants from his global hedge fund Elliott Management, the activist outfit that has been causing the Big Australian such grief over recent months.

Surprise!

Elliott’s black cardigan-wearing Hong Kong-based investment director James Smith and research director Nicholas Maran were both at the Competitive Advantage Forum in Sydney, an event held in partnership between The Australian and the Big Australian.

Also present was the hedge fund’s spinner Stephen Spruiell, who is based in New York, along with Singer, the bearded one with the fearsome reputation and fortune worth $3.4 billion.

Elliott is the firm that in April launched a noisy campaign against the Melbourne-headquartered global miner. It has argued that BHP should collapse its dual-listed structure, briefly pushing for a single listing in London — until that got a smack­down from Treasurer Scott Morrison.

Nicholas Maran, James Smith and Stephen Spruiell yesterday.

Team Elliott also argue BHP should float its US petroleum ­assets, another idea Nasser and BHP chief executive Andrew Mackenzie have strongly opposed.

So what did the visiting Elliott crew — who were seated on table nine in the ballroom at the Ivy — have to say for themselves?

Surprisingly little. They declined our invitations for a post-event interview to hear what they made of Nasser’s chat, a disappointing response from an outfit well known for its mouthy approach to investing.

Even Nasser’s inquisitor, Oz business columnist John Durie, couldn’t get the Elliott crew — aka “Table Nine” — to speak up.

“Are there any questions from Table Nine?” Durie asked from the stage, with Nasser looking out encouragingly at his hedge fund foes.

But Smith and his gang declined the offer, to the room’s disappointment. Who knew the visiting Masters of the Universe were so bashful?

The Big Snub

The Elliott crew, led by the brown loafer-wearing James Smith, were in Australia only for a few days on this trip.

We understand they flew out last night. The next move in their BHP agitation is anyone’s guess.

When they were in Australia in May on their previous visit they caught up with the Big Australian’s Scottish CEO, Andrew Mackenzie.

BHP’s Ken MacKenzie, centre, evades the Elliott crew. Picture: Hollie Adams.

On this trip their engagement with BHP seemed to be limited to their surprise appearance at yesterday’s lunch.

The team did manage a brief encounter with the outgoing Jac Nasser, on whose board Elliott — without any heads-up — launched a public assault in early April.

Among the post-lunch mingling, Smith shook hands with Nasser and had a brief chat, as one member of the Elliott team was overheard to say it was a “coincidence” that they were in Sydney on the day of the lunch. That’s one word for it.

John Durie and Jac Nasser at the forum yesterday. Picture: James Croucher

The Elliott gang then attempted, in a slightly chaotic fashion, to have a chat to Nasser’s successor Ken MacKenzie, who will become BHP’s chairman in September.

After months of telling the company off through the media, Elliott applauded the appointment of MacKenzie, the 53-year-old Canadian-born former boss of cardboard business Amcor.

The hedge fund called the appointment of MacKenzie, who only joined the board last year, a “constructive step in bringing much needed change to the direction of BHP”.

However, to go by MacKenzie’s reaction when Smith attempted to go in for a chat, it seems the incoming BHP chairman is far from convinced about the constructiveness of Elliott’s interest in the company.

Some onlookers called it “The Snub”.

Keating lets fly

Before Jac Nasser took the stage, he was introduced by his good friend and former prime minister Paul Keating.

As well as praising the departing Nasser, it provided a perfect opportunity for Keating to get a few things on the record.

For one, the wisdom of Keating’s decision to roll Australian Airlines into Qantas before he privatised it — something apparently not appreciated enough by Qantas chairman Leigh Clifford. “It’s still hard to get an upgrade on Qantas for me, I can tell you,” he said. “And there’s not enough appreciation at board level for what I did for those people.”

Paul Keating.

And there was an indirect swipe at American hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer’s Elliott gang.

“When I hear these, you know, opportunistic proposals by certain Americans about headquartering in London — they’re lucky I’m not the treasurer or the prime minister these days.”

As the crowd laughed, we’re pretty sure we saw the face of Elliott’s James Smith fall. What were they thinking when they put that relocation idea in their April pitch?

Missing in action

Meanwhile in South Australia, state Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis had a cunning plan for what could have been an awkward encounter with the local business community.

He didn’t turn up.

Koutsantonis was a no-show at yesterday’s post-budget lunch in Adelaide held by Daniel Gannon’s South Australian division of the Property Council.

In Koutsantonis’s place was David Reynolds, his chief public servant at the SA Treasury and Finance department.

So why the no-show?

“It was a diary mix-up,” Koutsantonis’s office told us, repeating the answer given by Reynolds at the lunch.

A mix-up, of course. And to think many had been speculating that Koutsantonis had pulled out because he was embarrassed about sharing a stage with ANZ’s South Australian chairman Jane Yuile, and being grilled about his $370 million bank levy in front of a crowd of 300-plus mostly unimpressed people.

Unhelpfully, the Treasurer’s office was unable to provide the other event that Koutsantonis was supposedly at. Perhaps a crisis meeting to prepare for the furious campaign we hear the big banks are cooking up?

That might not be a bad way to be spending his time right now. Sounds like a blizzard of pinstriped baseball bats is on the way to the troubled southern state.