Friday’s police raid on the offices of Scale Facilitation, reported by Margin Call, garnered international news attention over the weekend, including distinguished outlets like the Financial Times, the BBC, The Guardian and The Times of London.
And yet not a word about the police activity in the Australian Financial Review.
That’s an oddity considering the Fin has been eagerly inflating the reputation of Scale and its founder, David Collard, by printing articles about the business and its subsidiaries – at the rate of once a month since January.
Scale, of course, denies any wrongdoing and maintains that it’s co-operating with the Australian Federal Police investigation, which executed multiple warrants in Geelong last week.
Sadly, those assurances haven’t washed with the firm’s advisory board and numerous executives who appear to be jumping ship.
Lucas Kenny, Scale’s well-regarded general counsel, abruptly quit this month, with the company no longer even mentioned on his LinkedIn profile.
It would appear that he’s scrubbed the online CV so it only refers to “a start up business” for the 13 months he worked at Scale.
And he’s not the only staff member hiding his association, either.
We hear a further four executives across Australia and the US have walked with Kenny, including Joey Ballantyne, Scale’s managing director, who left this month for a “career break” to travel the world. Neatly timed!
Margin Call noticed the company’s website also underwent some back-end retooling over the weekend.
Once functional links promoting Scale’s advisory board are no longer accessible to members of the public. The page doesn’t load, and we can understand why, of course.
No doubt Australian Super director Claire Keating, retired British Army brigadier Edward Dawes and distinguished neurosurgeon Jeffrey Rosenfeld, among others, don’t want their fingerprints anywhere near this company at the minute.
Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles should also be feeling a bit embarrassed, having hitched his wagon to Collard and lauded him at more than one public speaking event. In December he described the 38-year-old as “innately entrepreneurial” and a “force of nature” during Scale’s launch party in NYC. At the time, Collard had been angling for a gigafactory to be built in Geelong – Marles’ electorate – and even took the DPM and Industry Minister Ed Husic on a tour of a prospective site for a “national battery ecosystem” to be constructed.
Needless to say the finance required for that project is now circling the drain courtesy of the police and tax office interest. We asked Marles about his relationship with Collard and the raid but, on this occasion, he ignored the questions entirely.
Meanwhile, we’re hearing some of Scale’s Australia-based staff and contractors still haven’t been paid their salaries, as promised.
That’s after company officials spun a tale to Margin Call weeks ago that a technical hiccup in Britain had caused temporary cashflow difficulties.
It couldn’t have been that bad, we think, if some of the Scale boys still found the dosh to fly to Monaco to watch the F1 and lark about at a buck’s party, as we keep hearing about.
PwC’s spinning wheel
PwC’s confused and erratic interactions with the press certainly haven’t been helped by the sheer volume of spinners jockeying with each other on offensive and defensive tactics in recent weeks.
Sure, blame the onerous partnership structure, the competing demands of head office, the chaotic fractures turning colleagues against each other. To recap: Labor-aligned TG Public Affairs were recruited by managing partner Peter Konindaris. Add to that former Liberal staffer Sean Berry, hired by acting CEO Kristin Stubbins, with PwC’s Nathan Schlesinger already in play, plus former Albo staffer Alex Cramb stuffed in the mix somewhere. Throw in Sue Cato, hired late by the tax partners, and that’s already way too many cooks.
No wonder PwC’s longstanding reputational adviser Rory Grant and Colbourne Advisory’s Andrew Thomas took one look at them all and decided to vamoose.
But it’s not the cast of thousands causing the breakdown of this clown-car so much as the questionable decision-making of the mercurial Ryan Stanton, PwC’s global reputation chief, who flew in from the US to, ostensibly, captain the disaster.
He arrived mid-May and seems to have been FIFO since then. And with clearly not enough spinners on retainer, Stanton engaged London-based Brunswick PR for advice and support.
That’s the firm started by Sir Alan Parker, a man who weathered his own PR disaster in 2018 as chairman of Save the Children UK. Stanton’s based in America; Brunswick PR doesn’t have an office in Sydney. With their limited knowledge of the Australian market, is it any wonder it’s such a circus? Stanton seems to have exhibited something of an allergy to transparency, which is why journalists have been stonewalled on their questions and information routinely withheld, a tactic clearly at odds with the new-wave values being championed so hard by PwC. As others have pointed out, Stubbins gave no interviews and we’re still waiting for a press conference.
Call it another symptom of the dysfunction that staff at the newly formed Project Bell entity – the gangrenous arm of PwC now being acquired by Allegro – were only updated at 5pm on Sunday by PwC brass about the developments already pinging all over the internet through the weekend.
Curiously, only one leading Bell partner was notably on the call, with the others – named in media coverage – mysteriously excluded from participating. Wonder what happened there?
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