Just weeks ago Luke Sayers was enjoying an Italian holiday, but now he is set to exit his positions across the consulting sector and Carlton Football Club in the wake of a lewd picture scandal.
Pictures showed Mr Sayers, the former heavyweight head of audit and consulting firm PwC Australia, beaming alongside daughters Bronte and Claudia. The boy from Rochester, in central Victoria, was stepping back from steering his consulting firm Sayers Group, having surrendered the executive chair role. Instead Mr Sayers would take on the role of chair at the partnership – while retaining the corner office – as he focused on his last year at the top of Carlton football club and a busy personal life. The businessman had just wrapped up the $16.5m sale of his stately home in Melbourne’s well-heeled East Hawthorn, flogging the 1886 mansion amid “downsizing” plans for Mr Sayers and his wife Cate. The former PwC boss had also told those close to him he thought the scandal surrounding the firm had moved on, noting in an interview last year – as he pushed for another term at the top of Carlton, while the public inquiries were continuing – “From my personal perspective, I believe that’s completed.” This is despite Mr Sayers having steered PwC from 2012 through to 2020 and the firm being in the glare of the Australian Taxation Office from at least 2016 over alleged breaches of government confidentiality. PwC’s former head of international tax, Peter Collins, was banned from the profession after being found to have taken confidential government tax briefings and shared them with others in the firm. This allowed PwC to front-run new tax laws introduced in 2016, with the firm’s election-eve pitch to clients that it had a solution to the new tax laws triggering an explosion at the ATO. In a meeting at PwC’s Sydney office, ATO deputy commissioner Mark Konza rebuked three of its senior tax partners over the plan. Mr Sayers, at this point entering his second stretch as chief executive at PwC, previously ran the firm’s tax practice. But on January 8 a lewd picture burst into Mr Sayers’ carefully curated world, with the shot of a penis presented on his X (formerly Twitter) account. The image, tagging a female executive at health insurer Bupa, a sponsor of the Carlton football club, landed at 8am in Italy and remained online for almost 13 minutes before Mr Sayers addressed it. “Sorry, my account has been hacked – please ignore all posts,” he said.
Mr Sayers doubled down on the hack, telling media he would “leave no stone unturned finding out who did this to me and my family”. But in the wake of his first interventions, Mr Sayers went silent, with calls to the businessman going unanswered and statements being issued on his behalf by senior partners at Sayers Group. Carlton, too, was left scrambling to respond to the lewd picture crisis, with Bupa acting boss Nicholas Stone demanding answers from the club over the incident. Carlton, like the broader AFL, has made much of its efforts to bring women into the game and shed the blokey image that has dominated the sport for decades. The club was one of several founding AFL Women’s teams. In response to the crisis, Carlton brought in the AFL’s powerful Integrity Commission, the league’s investigative body, which moved to interview Mr Sayers, as well as the woman tagged in the post. But behind the scenes Mr Sayers was also moving to manage the fallout, with the 63-year-old tapping several of his old Melbourne connections. This included Arnold Bloch Leibler “Mr Fix-it” Leon Zwier, a storied member of the Melbourne legal scene known for representing the likes of the Grollo family, the Pratts and Josh Frydenberg and a go-to guy for the Melbourne, Collingwood and Essendon Football clubs, as well as several Hawthorn players alleging historic racist treatment. Mr Sayers also tapped millionaire “spinner” Sharon McCrohan, who made a fortune representing Aussie fintech Afterpay after a career in politics for Labor premiers Steve Bracks and John Brumby.
McCrohan is among a coterie of public relations figures tapped by Mr Sayers in recent years as he’s sought to manage the message around Carlton and the scandal surrounding PwC. The veteran flack, who didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment, was tipped to be key to a flurry of statements made by Carlton, the AFL and Mr Sayers on Wednesday. The AFL and Carlton were in lock-step as the two revealed Mr Sayers had been cleared by the integrity commission, “based on the available evidence”, which found the club boss’s X account had been “compromised” and he did not post the picture. Despite this, Mr Sayers stood down as Carlton president, with his term set to run until the end of the year. Mr Sayers also revealed he would step aside from the top job at Sayers Group, which has been profitable since 2022, with nine powerful figures in the firm taking on the running of the consulting shop. However, the person responsible for the sharing of the lewd picture was not named. Sources have suggested Mr Sayers may also be facing a breakdown of his marriage to Cate, with whom he shares four children. Ms Sayers removed herself as a director of the Inclusion Foundation in October last year, a charity she co-founded with Mr Sayers to champion people with Down syndrome. Soon after the couple sold their Melbourne home. However, they still share a number of luxury properties including several renovated historical villas in the Italian city of Lucca.Sources close to the scandal said despite Mr Sayers’ attempt to stamp it out by resigning, it was not the end. “I don’t think this is going away for Luke,” one said.
Critics of PwC, who have been demanding answers over the firm’s links to the tax scandal, say Mr Sayers’ departure doesn’t clear the cloud from Sayers Group, with sources saying the consulting firm is already mulling a name change to mark a departure from its high-profile founder. Greens Senator Barbara Pocock warns both Sayers Group and PwC should be excluded from government contracts over their links to the tax scandal. Ms Pocock said Mr Sayers, who denies any knowledge of the tax scandal, had shown a “failure of accountability and leadership by any measure”. “Luke Sayers sat before the Senate and said he knew nothing. We found that implausible,” she said. “Whatever the truth about what and when Mr Sayers knew, as leader throughout these years, he should have known what was going on and accepted some responsibility. Dozens of people within PwC knew about the breach, as we know from the email trails.” Australian Federal Police are still investigating
Very pubic displayhangs over Sayers’ PwC pension
Hannah Wootton Reporter
Jan 28, 2025
If you learn who your real friends are in times of true crisis, then Luke Sayers must be
feeling popular. A d*** pic scandal forced
him to quit the Carlton presidency and step back from his consultancy
Sayers Group last week, but his pals at PwC are helping stymie the financial
sting.
Their former CEO clocked his 55th birthday last year. This means he can tap into a pension scheme that promises past PwC partners around 15 per cent of its profits annually, provided he’s not working for a rival.
Happier times: Cate and Luke Sayers (middle) attend the 2024 Australian Open
with ANZ’s Shayne Elliott and Paul O’Sullivan, Ruffy and Fiona Geminder, Tim
Gurner, Lindsay Fox and Jack Cowin. Jesse
Marlow
And, since he took an
indefinite leave of absence from Sayers Group last week, he technically
isn’t.
Average payments under the scheme are around $140,000 annually, scaled
depending on tenure and seniority. You can’t get much higher than a former CEO
who started as a grad.
The firm has gone silent on whether he will get the cash. But given it
resisted pressure to cut Sayers off during the tax leaks scandal despite the
entire sorry saga occurring on his watch (and the pension scheme providing that
former partners cannot have brought PwC into disrepute), it seems unlikely a
stray penis is going to cost him access.
Small change, perhaps, to someone waiting out the scandal in Tuscany and who
banked $16.5 million from the sale of his family home in December. But anything
helps – the Cinque Terre doesn’t do cheap bolt holes.
Back home, Sayers’ friends (as transactional as shares in his consulting
shop) have also been covertly working to limit the photo’s damage. Rule number
one of boys club is we protect our own.
Sayers has collected contacts – from former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews to
ousted Liberal MP Josh
Frydenberg to billionaire Lindsay Fox – for years. Seek co-founder Andrew Bassat invests
in Sayers Group, along with caravan king Gerry Ryan, Liberal travel honcho Andrew Burness and
Lindsay with son David
Fox. Whether they are saying it aloud or not, these tentacles
in the corridors of power are fantastic cover.
Corporate fix-it man Leon
Zwier is on
legal advice, former Labor staffer Sharon
McCrohan is on media management. Soft-gaze features about the
expected rehabilitation
of Melbourne’s main man are appearing in major publications – Shane Warne would be
impressed by that level of spin.
The AFL and Carlton also closed ranks around him, the former clearing Sayers
by accepting his “it wasn’t me” defence and the latter announcing his
resignation in lock step. Isn’t it handy that the AFL can only thoroughly
investigate club officials?
Then, his confidantes are suggesting Sayers’ X account was “compromised” by
someone close to him. The Collins Street set knows no one with good manners
will probe a family matter too hard.
But helpers didn’t get where they were through blind loyalty, and there’s
already jostling to take over at Carlton.
Frydenberg’s name has – as usual – been canvassed. So has ANZ banker Mark Whelan’s, radio
presenter Tom Elliott,
premiership player and failed mayoral candidate Anthony Koutoufides, acting co-president and
JPMorgan chairman Rob
Priestley and, bizarrely, former state Labor minister Martin Pakula. With
friends like these...
The country’s most expert opinion and analysis. Sign
up to our weekly Opinion newsletter.
Hannah Wootton is a reporter for the Financial Review. Connect with Hannah on Twitter.
Email Hannah at hannah.wootton@afr.com