Women flee from MinRes; Family largesse from Packer’s ex

MinRes chief executive Chris Ellison is firmly against working from home.

Mineral Resources did much crowing about its recruitment of Bronwyn Grieve to its leadership team last year, hiring the esteemed lawyer to a mop-and-bucket role of chief people and shared services officer. It was basically a clean-up appointment, created especially for Grieve at a time when the company and its hot-headed chief executive, Chris Ellison, were being rinsed with bad press from a grinding battle in the civil courts.

Grieve, the most senior woman to work with Ellison, is now gone in almost record time, and it looks like her mandate to revamp the culture was blocked at every turn. What hope did she have when mere months after starting, Ellison gives a strongman interview in these pages shutting down the prospect of hybrid-working arrangements and saying there’s no place for it at the company?

“If you want to work from home, you don’t work here,” he grunted in May. Real smooth, pal.

Bronwyn Grieve has quit her job at Mineral Resources.

So much for attracting more women to the workplace.

More about Ellison seemed to emerge in his battle with Steven Pigozzo, a former employee who sued MinRes for unfair dismissal.

Accused of insider trading and other badness, Pigozzo claimed that Ellison forced him to delete important emails relating to a legal matter and carry out menial tasks on company time for the billionaire’s $6m home refurbishments, or do gofer work on his superyacht (all denied by Ellison and MinRes, who are mounting countersuits against Pigozzo).

Anyway, in comes Grieve with a decorated CV studded with time at the United Nations, World Bank Group and a couple of years advising the West Australian government during the pandemic.
She arrives at MinRes in August while mining is undergoing a cultural reckoning, and while competitors like Fortescue are haemorrhaging staff, while Rio is conducting its own cultural audits – and somehow she barely lasts a year at the firm, finishing up a month ago, according to amendments made to her LinkedIn profile.

That’s not too far out from the recent departure of MinRes EGM Shelley Robertson, who quit in March, we note. All these female exits … everything all right in there?

What to make of this abrupt separation when the person charged with overhauling the culture vanishes so quickly? Is there a mild allergy to reform coming from the C-suites?

It’s a shame, too, because Grieve was tapped to replace outgoing premier Mark McGowan in the seat of Rockingham leading up to a by-election that was held only last month.

Had Grieve said yes, she might have been a member of parliament by now, with Magenta Marshall – McGowan’s successor – cruising to victory with about 50 per cent of the primary vote.

 

Family values

The father of her three children is restless billionaire James Packer, so is that why Erica Packer was suddenly gripped by a streak of generosity earlier this year?

She lives in Los Angeles but stayed with Packer in their two-storey skyhome apartment at Barangaroo when they visited Sydney in March.

And it looks like Erica moved to tie off at least one loose end concerning some real estate, her sister Joanna and brother-in-law David Hunter while she was here, bestowing on them a gift worth half a million dollars.

James Packer with his then wife, Erica. Picture: AFP

Readers will recall that Erica gave her sister a Vaucluse mansion in 2020 purchased for $4.3m in 2006. Well, almost all of it; Erica retained 5 per cent and recently offloaded it for $1.

That’s for a pad now estimated to be worth $9.5m, meaning Erica’s little remaining stake was in the ballpark of $430,000.

But what’s money between family?

Bank of where?

Is there really no candidate of any merit or talent north of the border who could serve as a director of Bank of Queensland?

Chief executive Patrick Allaway enjoys the multimillion-dollar lifestyle of Sydney’s northern beaches, commuting to Queensland for about one week a month. That might sound a bit cheeky, but no one else on the board, chaired by Warwick Negus, of Point Piper, lives in the Sunshine State, either.

Bank of Queensland chief Patrick Allaway. Picture: Jane Dempster

Downtable directors Jenny Fagg and Karen Penrose live in Sydney, Bruce Carter calls suburban Adelaide home, Deborah Kiers is in Melbourne’s Brighton, while Mickie Rosen jets in for her directorial duties from Los Angeles.

A bank spokesman confirmed the board didn’t have a Queensland-based director, saying of Allaway: “Patrick divides his time between our offices and in a typical month spends at least a week in Brisbane and a few days in Melbourne.”

The Allaways did try selling their Avalon abode a year ago for between $11.5m and $12.5m, but that fell through. Paperwork, we note, may not be the boss’s strongest suit; some of his mail from ASIC is still going to an Esther Ave, Mosman, address that he and his wife sold six years ago.