By Noel Towell and Vikrant Kishore
Luke Sayers is having something of a winter of discontent, with his old company PwC knee-deep in muck and the football club over which he presides, Carlton, struggling through a losing season that had promised so much and is pushing the patience of its long-suffering fans past breaking point.
Credit: Joe Benke
But before we feel too sorry for the impeccably connected corporate and government fixer, consider this: Sayers will soon leave his troubles behind, or so he hopes, with a long-planned, extended European holiday.
Just as the PwC scandal is starting to heat up, Sayers is ready to lock up his mansion in Hawthorn and jet off with his wife Cate to Italy, where the couple keep a place to maintain her Italian heritage and indulge their shared love of Barolo wines.
The pair will also celebrate Cate’s 50th birthday while they’re there.
A nice thing about running your own consulting agency – aside from the steady stream of state and federal government contracts it secures – is that no one at the office can begrudge you a little of la dolce vita.
Will the Carlton members be as generous if the Blues don’t find a way to turn things around? Although the club president can’t do much to fix Harry McKay’s goalkicking, footy fans aren’t always rational.
CBD remembers the rough treatment a former AFL boss copped for missing one Friday night match to go to the opera.
We expect that Sayers’ critic-in-chief at Carlton, pokies magnate Bruce Mathieson, will be only too happy to draw attention to the pres’ absence.
Sayers assures us that while he is away, he won’t miss a board meeting or a ball kicked.
“I do have a trip coming up to Europe for a long-planned family event. Rest assured, I will be attending Carlton board meetings, watching the games and managing business while I am away,” he said.
And if that business includes a subpoena to attend the Senate inquiry into the PwC tax avoidance fiasco?
Quel che sara, sara, as the Italians say.
FAIR SHARE
Atlassian tech billionaires Mike Cannon Brookes and Scott Farquhar, standard-bearers for new-economy rich listers, are showing they can take a lesson from the old guard.
The pair have told investors of plans to sell a dollop of their stake in the business, with about $US345 million of their Nasdaq-listed Atlassian shareholdings to be offloaded in the 12 months from June 2023.
Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes (left) and Scott Farquhar.Credit: AFR
But before going to market, the 2 million or so shares will be converted from class-B status – which gives each share 10 votes on the floor of the company’s annual meeting – to class-A, with just one vote per share.
So Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar – and they’ve been quite upfront about this in their announcement – will reduce their stake in the company from nearly 41 per cent to just over 39 per cent, but their voting power shrinks by just 0.7 per cent or so, and they will still control more than 86 per cent of the vote.
Remind you of anything?
Cashing out of a company while retaining an iron grip on it is a technique perfected by Rupert Murdoch and his family, which owns about 14 per cent of stock in the Fox Corp and News Corp companies that play such a key role in the empire but controls about 40 per cent of the voting rights, ensuring the chances of the Murdochs not getting their way are always remote.
Nice to see some traditions are still observed.
KING HIT
It’s weeks since the coronation of King Charles, and Australia’s monarchists are still losing their minds over the ABC mentioning the evils of empire in its broadcast of the affair.
As CBD reported recently, Australians for Constitutional Monarchy lobbed a formal complaint into the public broadcaster, alleging the panel’s discussion had left viewers “gratuitously offended”.
The public broadcaster’s internal ombudsman gave the broadcast the all clear. But the David Flint-led ACM has appealed to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, alleging that parts of its complaint relating to accuracy and causing gratuitous harm and offence weren’t addressed.
The authority’s last big investigation into the ABC, over that Four Corners special on Fox News, took a whole year to complete, so don’t expect this to wind up any time soon.
The fallout from the coronation broadcast already forced Stan Grant off air, with the Q&A host quitting after the broadcaster’s largely white management failed to respond to or support him through the deluge of racist abuse that followed the coronation. What more could ACM want?
SPINNING AROUND
There has been more movement at Anthony Albanese’s press shop, with respected former Channel Seven and Network Ten foreign correspondent Emma Dallimore finishing up after completing a short-term contract that began in February.
Dallimore was brought in to backfill for Prime Minister’s Office press secretary Josh Lloyd – who took leave to help out on Mary Doyle’s successful Aston byelection campaign – and her exit has raised eyebrows in the ministerial wing. Dallimore had been expected to stick around with the breadth of her experience, but it was not to be and the amicable conscious uncoupling took place last Friday.
Suze Metherell, a former journo turned spinner for Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus’ office, has been drafted into the PMO to take over from Dallimore – at least for the next month.
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