Star Entertainment’s directors must go, as Crown Resort’s did

Star Entertainment directors must go following revealations at the royal commission-like inquiry, much like the clear out at James Packer’s Crown Resorts. Picture: Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg

The 2018 annual report of Crown Resorts listed 10 directors – not including James Packer who by then was no longer on the board but would have been the all-too present ghost at every board meeting.

Every one of those directors has now – mostly, long-since – gone with the sole exception of former federal public servant Jane Halton, who back in 2018 had only just joined the board and has had to act as its sole keeper of the institutional corporate memory.

Exactly the same thing now has to happen at Crown’s major competitor, Star Entertainment, after the revelations at the royal commission-like inquiry into whether it is fit to continue to hold its casino licence.

Right now, even though the public inquiry has just got underway, enough damning evidence has already surfaced to all-but definitively answer that question in the negative.

Both in terms of the – ever downward – path the Crown saga so agonisingly tracked, and the nature of the Star evidence itself, it is clearly going to only get worse.

There is no way, no way, we are going to wake up one morning to the news that Star has been given a shiny clean bill of regulatory health.

That yes, it was fit to hold the licence; that it needed no reform, no change of personnel and processes. And, very potently, that there would be no financial penalty to pay.

Star has seven directors. Every one of them was on the board back in 2018. Every one of them takes collective responsibility for what has already been revealed and what surely is yet to come.

Every one of them has to go, from the chairman John O’Neill and chief executive Max Bekier down; and every one of them must be gone before the end of the year.

The process of departure has to be accelerated relative to what happened at Crown, precisely because of what happened at Crown.

This time around, we know exactly where the destination is going to be; we know exactly what is going to be at stake; we know exactly how sweeping – total – the board and executive management renewal has to be.

Arguably in my opinion, the board’s only statement so far in response to the already damming revelations, including that Star had disguised as “hotel expenses” nearly a billion dollars in transactions linked to Chinese high rollers, was in itself damming of the board.

“As the review is ongoing, The Star does not consider it appropriate at this stage to comment on matters which remain before the Review and which will be considered in that process,” was the board-authorised response.

That is tantamount to a claim to be able to say nothing to shareholders and indeed the broader market for so long as the Review continues.

Much more importantly, what was missing was any suggestion of a board commitment to immediately rectify the failings being exposed.

Star is already being investigated by the anti-money laundering agency Austrac.

Any earlier failings which might end up incurring significant penalties would be bad enough; contemporary failings and penalties would be utterly unacceptable.

Furthermore, turning over the entire board cannot sensibly or responsibly be done overnight. It has to be done progressively but it has to start with the chairman and very soon after that the CEO.

But it also has to be done relatively quickly and not dragged out as we saw with Crown.

And even then, Crown was relatively, well, lucky. The new board was always going to be an interim board, as it was quite clear that Packer would sell his controlling holding to a new owner, who would obviously wish to select its own board of directors.