![]() The AGM transcript hasn’t been released yet but when it does come, you will discover a smorgasbord of interesting exchanges on everything from political donations, support for a Federal gambling industry ombudsman, all those sports betting ads, the remarkable Damon Kitney interview with James Packer in The Weekend Australian, remuneration protest votes, the Wilkie allegations, James Packer working for free and the company’s response to this extraordinary tale of gambling harm on 7.30 last week. “From my perspective, I think it is conversation the board should have,” he declared. This AGM was heading to a car crash outcome for Crown where we were going to raise every issue under the sun – streets brawls with David Gyngell, Israeli corruption investigations, sisterly payouts, Scientology and the rest – and they were going to look paranoid, unco-operative and in the bunker.īut then all of sudden, James Packer intervened, making a snap decision to effectively slap down his chairman and declare that Crown needs to become more transparent on everything from gambling harm data, to AGM processes and divisional break-downs between pokies and table games. ![]() This generated another gruff comment from chair John Alexander who basically said that it was a free world and Crown was perfectly fine to hire any lobbyists they needed to get the political and regulatory job done for them. Tim Costello then reeled off all the politically connected people hired by Crown and James Packer - Karl Bitar, Mark Arbib, Stephen Conroy, Graham Richardson, Peter Credlin, Helen Coonan and the like – and asked why this happened and whether it could stop? The chairman curtly said no and no and Crown was already looking needlessly secretive and paranoid. Security was typically tight as no-one does AGM lock-downs quite like Crown, so my opening gambit went to transparency asking for a transcript to be provided of the AGM debate and a breakdown of poker machine and table game revenue at Crown Melbourne. Fortuitously, two kind souls unexpectedly appointed me as their proxy so we didn’t have to go through the rigmarole of negotiating speaking rights after giving my voting rights to a third party.Įxecutive chairman John Alexander breezed through his prepared remarks in about 15 minutes and then we were into debate.ĪSA director Geoff Bowd got up three times during proceedings, AFR reporter Aaron Patrick got up once and apart from that, the floor was ours for about an hour. ![]() Interestingly, it was also the my first AGM where the agenda was explicitly aimed at reducing shareholder returns, in this case by cutting the enormous revenues Crown generates from vulnerable or addicted gamblers.Īpart from working for The Constant Investor, my other part-time gig is running communications for The Alliance for Gambling Reform so the shareholder activism world was merged with the gambling reform movement when we took a three person delegation into today’s Crown AGM.Īlliance director and spokesman Tim Costello attended as my proxy and former pokies addict Anna Bardsley attending as my wife’s proxy. I’ve asked questions at more than 450 public company AGMs over the past 19 years but none have been quite as exhilarating or interesting as the Crown Resorts gathering in Melbourne this morning. An hour of fascinating debate with James Packer
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