- People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.
- ~ (Otto von Bismarck, German politician, 1815-1898)
Luke Sayers who? PwC and the network that wasn’t there
On our more charitable days we can easily pity PwC change operative Kevin Burrowes, drafted in by the firm’s global leadership from Singapore to sort out and contain their Antipodean crisis. He’s gone from Singapore Slings and holidays in the Maldives to bungling his way through a world of warring fiefdoms, revenge leaking and the utmost public scrutiny.
Facing the Senate for the second time earlier this month, he was asked his salary. “Currently $2.4 million,” he responded without skipping a beat, for which he was thanked for his candour.
The figure – substantially less than the $4.6 million paid to ex-chief Tom Seymour – raised eyebrows throughout the firm. And no wonder: it isn’t right.
Burrowes’ pay is closer to $2.8 million. PwC’s spokesman insists the firm contacted the Senate to correct the record long before we asked, which we hope is true. Just ask KPMG chief Andrew Yates what happens when that place believes it’s been misled ...
How could Burrowes have missed $400,000? Well, remember he was based in Singapore before. Converting 2.4 million Singaporean dollars gets you something like $2.8 million Australian. Perhaps the man is already dreaming of the day he can spend it in his preferred currency, at long lunches at Clarke Quay or Raffles, having kissed this fatal shore goodbye.
He’s not the only migrant who must now look with some measure of distaste on the PwC-inspired mess waiting for him Down Under.
Now-OECD secretary-general Mathias Cormann last week broke his silence on the confidentiality breaches at PwC that occurred while he was Australia’s finance minister. He says he asked to relinquish his equity stake in Luke Sayers′ Sayers Group the day Sayers revealed its existence to the Senate.
Sayers was CEO of PwC at the time then-PwC operativePeter Collins shared confidential government plans to reform multinational tax laws with colleagues, but has repeatedly insisted he knew nothing about what was going on in the tax division. He had left the firm by the time the breach came to light, and is now running his own eponymous consultancy.
Through a spokesman to trade publication Law360, Cormann said he also didn’t know about the PwC confidentiality breaches when he received the shares in Sayers Group, that he didn’t receive any cash for relinquishing his stake, and further, he never even knew Sayers while he was CEO of PwC Australia, or have “any interactions with him”.
Sayers – never a man prone to downplaying his access – is backing up our man in Paris, saying through a spokesman on Sunday he “did not have any interactions with Mr Cormann” while he was PwC CEO.
This is as surprising to PwC operatives as it is to us, familiar as they are with Sayers’ prodigious enthusiasm for networking.
He became CEO in 2012, and from 2018 the firm sponsored the Liberal Party’s budget night fundraiser, which was routinely attended by all key government ministers and Sayers, who was prominently seated on the head table. In 2018, the firm also hosted a full-day fundraising event for the Liberal Party at its Sydney offices, where donors could “nominate up to five meetings with ministers” before a dinner with then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Go figure: either Cormann as finance minister didn’t attend any of these functions, or he did, and never thought to thank his host! And Sayers, for his part, offered equity in his post-PwC start-up to a former federal minister he had only met recently.
In cabinet, where he was the minister responsible for the powerful Finance Department until October 2020, Cormann oversaw a nearly four-fold increase in federal government spending on consultants. And after he left parliament, the former finance minister was soon doing unspecified “work” for Sayers Group, after which he was offered equity in the expectation (or hope) he would become a partner. Even after he was appointed OECD chief, his personal association with the firm continued, both through the equity and in his giving a speech at the firm’s Collins Street offices some two months before taking up his OECD duties.
But these were all new linkages, both men insist, excluding both Sayers’ period at PwC and (by deduction) Cormann’s period as finance minister.
Implausible? Possibly. But on the record? Absolutely.
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Myriam Robin is Rear Window editor based in the Melbourne newsroom. A Rear Window columnist since 2017, she previously reported on financial markets and media. Connect with Myriam on Twitter. Email Myriam at myriam.robin@afr.com
Mark Di Stefano is Rear Window columnist, based in the Sydney newsroom. He previously worked at BuzzFeed, the Financial Times and The Information before joining the Financial Review as a media and tech correspondent. Connect with Mark on Twitter. Email Mark at mark.distefano@afr.com