Sydney Theatre Company donations drop after Palestinian scarf stunt

Harry Greenwood along with co-stars Megan Wilding and Mabel Li wore keffiyeh scarves during the encore at the opening night of the STC production of The Seagull at Sydney’s Roslyn Packer Theatre. Picture: Instagram

The Sydney Theatre Company has finally released its financial accounts, confirming what everybody already knew months ago – that it would pay a hefty price for the spectacularly poor handling of that Palestinian scarf fiasco, when three actors, in November 2023, draped themselves in keffiyehs at the end of a Chekhov production to show solidarity, bizarrely, with a group of terrorists.

We knew donations would be yanked. Jewish donors to the STC told us it would happen — it’s just that now we know roughly the dollar figures.

And it’s substantially more than the $1.5m forecast a year ago in some corners of the press. The STC’s accounts reveal that gross fundraising revenue was routed from $7.4m in 2023 to $4.8m in 2024. Direct donations, in particular — that is, cash raked in outside of campaign drives and annual appeals — fell by just over a million dollars, from $4.49m to $3.47m.

You can be assured the Ann Johnson-chaired STC was ever-soothing in its assessment of this diabolic outcome. It called the cratering of donations, down 25 per cent, a “slight dip” in an accompanying statement it released with the accounts.

That’s certainly a polite way to phrase it.

A “slight dip” would describe a million-dollar loss as a rounding error on a balance sheet. It’s what happens when Gretel Packer – no longer an STC board member — takes all her gal pals out for the guilty pleasure of seeing Wicked at the Lyric for the fifth time instead of making them all suffer through another snooty STC yawn-fest at Walsh Bay.

Call it what it is, Ann, a staggering plunge for a theatre shop in the thrall of losses – $1.8m last year and $565,759 in 2024.

Even the board, comprising Lendlease’s David Craig, Temple and Webster’s Mark Coulter and investment guru David Paradice have practically surrendered themselves to further deficits.

They speak as though they’re all lying in the gutter looking at the stars, hoping at best to break-even some day.

“The group remains committed to delivering a break-even or better operational result in future years,” the accounts said solemnly. And that’s to say nothing of pre-sale subscription and ticket sales, which were also significantly lower. They brought in $12.3m in 2023 and $9m in 2024.

The STC was eager not to focus on any of this but instead on its record revenue ($47m) and a doubling of butts on seats. It said 512,155 people saw an STC production in 2024, up from 262,123 in 2023.

Yes, they do love a pat on the back, the STC. It explains why some senior management personnel enjoyed more pay over the 12 months (even though the whole place is losing money), their short and long-term benefits increasing to $1.6m from $1.3m the year prior.

A strange time to be handing out bonuses while the fat lady of finance is starting to sing. YB

Pact campaign closed

Not with a bang, but a whimper, Raphael Geminder has finally closed out his campaign to take Pact Group off the stockmarket.

Thursday’s meeting was just a formality after the ASX’s bizarre decision to require just a simple majority of shares voted to approve the delisting. Why bother even requiring a meeting, then, given Geminder holds 88 per cent of the company’s stock?

Complaints to the Takeovers Panel failed to gain any traction, leaving minority shareholders with only a month to dump their stock on the market or risk being stuck being unable to sell to anyone other than the company’s founder.

Still, more than 115 shareholders bothered to submit a vote. On the votes tallied ahead of the meeting, Geminder had somehow attracted the support of an extra 2 per cent of shares from holders that somehow believe they will be better off if they don’t have a market to sell their shares.

Pact Group founder Raphael Geminder. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

Normally you’d guess they would be shares held by the board and senior management, except that Pact’s last set of annual results show that none of them – other than Geminder – hold any voting shares.

Still, despite Pact shedding the onerous disclosure and governance burdens that come with a public listing, Geminder was happy to make it clear the board wasn’t considering any reduction in director’s fees in line with their reduced responsibilities.

Lucky for them.

Delisting the company doesn’t quite end Pact’s requirement to tell shareholders about material transactions and changes in its outlook. While the company retains more than 100 shareholders, it will still have some continuous disclosure requirements under the Corporations Act, and will need to post half-year as well as annual financial reports. Pact had some 1800 shareholders at the end of last financial year – mostly rats and mice, as they say, given the top 20 collectively held 97.4 per cent of the company.

But if that number ever drops below 100, Pact becomes a private company and almost all of its disclosure obligations fall away.

Geminder told shareholders on Thursday they need to sell within a month to be assured of being able to find a buyer for their stock as Pact “does not currently intend to offer a trading facility for shareholders post delisting”. It might consider doing so in the future, he said – though Margin Call is prepared to bet that will be through a buy-back offer from the company, or a mop-up by its majority shareholder, and prices well below the 84c Geminder offered last time around.

Not all will take it up, though. Margin Call understands that perpetual Geminder irritants Mark Gandur and David Harris intend to hang on to their stock for as long as they can, just because it annoys the Pact founder. NE

Bligh’s big send-off

Let’s be honest: maybe a handful of people around the country are waiting baited to find out who’ll replace Anna Bligh as chief executive of the Australian Banking Association. And by a handful we mean four, maybe five people, basically the contenders for the job; they’re a smattering of former NSW premiers and Simon Birmingham, according to our chums at the Fin.

The point we’re making is that no one is really aching to know who’s next in line to steer the nation’s banking lobby. Blurgh. Eyeroll. Boring.

However! Many people do very much care about raising a glass in honour of Bligh, which they did at a stakeholder farewell thrown at NAB’s HQ in Sydney on Wednesday night – a casual bash hosted by Andrew Irvine even though Bligh, technically, doesn’t have a finishing date.

Outgoing ABA chief executive Anna Bligh. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Treasurer Jim Chalmers turned up with old assistant treasurer Stephen Jones and Labor’s freshly-minted one, Dan Mulino. The big four bosses were there, obviously, except for Nuno Matos (apologies sent). Instead, ANZ was represented by group executive Clare Morgan.

Props from the regulators. There was Joe Longo, Gina Cass-Gottlieb and APRA chair John Lonsdale. Handy with the spiel, that lot, and no geeks off the street at these drinkie-poos, either, unless you count Steven Kennedy, technically the nation’s biggest public service geek now that he’s been appointed secretary of the PM&C. A close second would be department secretary Meghan Quinn, a friend of Bligh and now head of the bureaucracy that leads Industry, Science and Resources. She schlepped along for the 90 minutes of chat, as did Josh Frydenberg, all the way from Melbourne, and RBA spinner Sally Cray, formerly Malcolm Turnbull’s private secretary. YB