Borghetti an astute pic for Crown chair role

Former long-time Virgin Airlines boss John Borghetti is to my mind the casino chairman from central casting.

Former Virgin Australia Group CEO and Managing Director John Borghetti.

Former long-time Virgin Airlines boss John Borghetti is to my mind the casino chairman from central casting.

Indeed even more specifically, the Crown casino chairman from central casting.

That is to say, his great skills of salesmanship and diplomacy, slot him perfectly into his new task, almost like no other I can easily think of.

And task it will be, it’s no just ‘preside over eight-board-meetings-a-year’ sort of role.

For if the – OK, mammoth 24kt solid gold – penny hasn’t well and truly dropped by now, chairing a casino group board, is a major, major job - I’d argue, a far bigger job indeed even than that of the actual casino CEO.

Because the chairman has to both lead and manage that CEO, way tighter than normal chairman-CEO relationships.

So that’s to say, effectively chairing the board.

If there’s been an effective chairman of either Crown or its rival Star in their entire corporate lifetimes - Borghetti’s immediate predecessor at Crown aside - that person doesn’t spring readily to mind.

Simple question: would they have got into their very existential - and seemingly for Star, never-ending - messes if there had been such a chairman at either?

Now it might be a tad overstating things to suggest a Churchillian parallel for Borghetti.

That as Churchill noted, on becoming UK PM in 1940, it seemed “all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial”.

But certainly, Borghetti’s time at Virgin, and more specifically his decade-long masterly management of Virgin’s international airline shareholders, has exactly fitted him for his Crown role.

There are four major elements to his role.

First of course is delivering for Crown’s one shareholder - giant US investor Blackstone - which is itself on the griddle to deliver for its return-hungry investors.

It’s a task made much more challenging by the way Blackstone paid way, way too much for Crown.

As I explained last year, James Packer sold Crown for $9bn in 2022. Barely 18 months later, it was worth, I suggested, more like $4bn. Tops. Indeed, maybe as little as $2bn.

Borghetti’s equally important task is to keep all the - now, just quite possibly awake - regulators happy.

As his ‘friends across the bridge up in Sydney’, so to speak, are bleakly pondering: you don’t have a casino for long, if you don’t have a licence.

At the same time, Borghetti’s got to oversee the building of a new business model. Now that the Chinese ‘whales’ are no longer coming, and when even the basic local ‘grunt’ market is looking soggy, especially in Melbourne.

And of course, he’s got to oversight and really manage Crown’s CEO and management.

Now you might well say all that’s really the CEO’s job. Absolutely true. But as we’ve seen with the casinos – and also the banks – it’s even more also the chairman’s job as well.

The buck really stops at the chairman’s desk.

Precisely because of how he operated so skilfully - in managing, and managing off the airline shareholders - as CEO at Virgin, Borghetti slots in so perfectly now, to the similar but also very different job at Crown.

Originally published as Borghetti an astute pic for Crown chair role