Malcolm Turnbull hired by investment firm KKR

Once famed as an outsider in the political party he led to victory, the ex-PM has become a “barbarian at the gate”.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has landed a new job in New York.

Once famed as an outsider in the political party he led to election victory, Malcolm Turnbull has become a “barbarian at the gate”, joining private equity firm KKR in his return to the private sector.

KKR announced yesterday the former Prime Minister, ousted in a Canberra leader spill last year, would join as a “senior global advisor” from June 1.

“Given Mr. Turnbull’s significant background in the private and public sectors, he has unique experience and holds a distinct point of view regarding how KKR can help address the problems our changing world presents,” KKR said in a statement.

Mr Turnbull, a former investment banker who headed the Australian operations of Goldman Sachs in the 1990, joins other senior Australian and regional business leaders on KKR’s list of senior advisors, including former CSL boss Brian Mcnamee. Qantas chairman Leigh Clifford and one-time Singaporean finance minister Lim Hwee Hua.

The private equity firm, one of the biggest in the world, won infamy in the 1980s as a pioneer of the so-called leveraged buyout — in which money borrowed to buy a company winds up being repaid by the company that was bought — after its fiercely contested $US25 billion buyout of US tobacco and food conglomerate RJR Nabisco spawned the best-selling book, Barbarians at the Gate.

KKR has been a regular presence in Australia’s corporate scene, backing billionaire Kerry Stokes in 2006 by taking half of Channel 7’s assets, before losing out to Wesfarmers in a $20 billion takeover battle for control of Coles supermarkets in a year later, and then backing Stokes again as he took control of the West Australian newspaper.

In 2017 it bought a majority stake in Laser Clinics Australia for $650 million, and year it bought accounting software business MYOB for $2 billion.

KKR said its external advisers helped the buyout specialists “understand the investment implications of trends and developments in public policy, regulation, societal needs and technology around the world”.

Mr Turnbull is not the first former Prime Minister to join an investment bank on his retirement from politics. Labor’s Paul Keating joined the Australian arm of Lazard as an advisor and then chairman, and was followed into the company by former Federal finance minister Lindsay Tanner in 2010.

Another senior Labor figure, Bob Carr consulted to Macquarie Group after his stint as the NSW Premier, before quitting the company in order to join the Senate and become Australia’s foreign minister.