James Packer does his own spin-doctoring — but he needs to join Twitter

Monday’s Crikey piece about James Packer and Peter Costello finished with the following paragraph*:

Packer has a team of spin doctors in place trying to restore his reputation. This is why he recently donated $250,000 to the Julian Assange campaign. However, this hit on Peter Costello also suggests that he has revenge on his menu as well.

While the revenge line was right, it turns out the spin doctor claim was wrong and it wasn’t a PR flunky who made contact from an CPH email address to the mobile number to point this out but the billionaire himself.

“What about saying I have a team of spin doctors in place?” Packer wrote yesterday from his $250 million boat ICJ. “Who are they? I don’t pay one person to help with my reputation. Not one person. Unusual that, I would guess for a person in my position.”

Unusual indeed, particularly for someone who has a plan to participate in wide-ranging public debate and a stated goal of restoring his battered reputation after the various Crown casino scandals.

After a good deal of back and forth yesterday, I reckon Packer simply needs to get on to Twitter. He wants to engage in conversation and discussion on a wide range of topics, most notably the political issues of the day — such as Australia’s relationship with China, who will be the next US president, and the treatment of Julian Assange, which he is particularly aggrieved about.

He’s also not at all reluctant to rake over the coals at Crown, assessing which state governments treated him well and who did him over. Relationship with journalists such as the AFR’s much-feared Rear Window gossip columnist Joe Aston were also discussed.

After three separate state-based judicial inquiries into his Crown empire by the NSW, Victorian and Western Australian governments, Packer was effectively banned from influencing the company and ultimately agreed to sell the business to Blackstone, the world’s biggest private equity firm.

In my view, he was lucky to get out with more than $4 billion in cash for his 47% stake and also lucky not to face any civil action from ASIC, such as a ban from serving on the board of Australian public companies.

As for Nine chairman Peter Costello, Packer is very blunt in his assessment, calling him both a liar and a hypocrite.

Some of the key facts are contested, but this timeline helps to understand what happened.

After Costello revealed his intention to resign from Parliament on October 7 2009, the Rudd government announced his appointment to the board of the Future Fund with indecent haste on November 1, five weeks before the December 5 Higgins byelection.

The deal with Rudd was presumably done before Costello announced his departure — who wants a potent political rival to stay in the Parliament — but it did spark a strong rebuke from Paul Keating.

Costello’s first executive gig on leaving Parliament was with a corporate advisory firm called BKK, which was launched on November 4 2009 and established by his old university friend Alastair Walton, a former Goldman Sachs Australia CEO.

Despite being a high flying Future Fund “Guardian”, in August 2011 Costello then set up a lobbying and advisory outfit called ECG with two former staffers: Jonathan Epstein and David Gazard. Costello was a one-third shareholder in ECG and non-executive chairman because his main gig after leaving Parliament was with BKK.

However, after four years of operation, BKK shut its Melbourne office at 101 Collins Street in July 2013 when Costello left and moved across the road into the offices of ECG at 120 Collins Street.

This might partially explain the comments by Gazard to The Australian this week that Packer’s $300,000 in payments to Costello had nothing to do with ECG. The Packer payments to Costello started in September 2011 and, according to Jonathan Epstein’s Linkedin profile, ECG was created in August 2011.

Perhaps the contract was with BKK, although this comment from Costello to The Australian suggests it was personal: “My contract with … CPH ended in 2012 and I have had no engagement since.” 

In Packer’s view, Costello was retained to assist with lobbying his former staffer Michael O’Brien who became Victoria’s gaming minister in December 2010. Costello claims it was to provide broad financial advice to Packer holding company CPH, not gambling-related lobbying.

Despite missing the Packer job, ECG did take on some controversial lobbying assignments. The global oil giant Shell was one of its earliest clients, which was ironic given that Costello famously blocked Shell’s $5 billion takeover bid for Woodside in April 2001, triggering an immediate 1.5 cent drop in the Australian dollar to US50.5 cents.

While privately on Packer’s books for 13 months from September 2011 until October 2012, Costello was also involved in an unseemly public spat over the chairmanship of the Future Fund in March 2012 when the Gillard government overturned a board recommendation and installed David Gonski as chair to succeed David Murray. Costello finally landed the Future Fund chair in February 2014, five months after the Abbott government took power and six weeks after Gonski had voluntarily vacated the position to take on the chairmanship of ANZ.

At around the same time as leaving BKK, Costello’s first and only public company board gig at Nine was unfolding in 2013. He rose to be chair in 2016 and then kept the role after the Fairfax merger in 2018. Over the past nine years, Nine’s shareholders have paid Costello about $3 million and Packer thinks that it is time he departed from that role.

The debate at Nine’s AGM on November 10 will be very interesting indeed, and here’s a question for Costello in advance: “Your current term expires at the 2023 AGM when you would have served 10 years on the board and seven years as chairman. Is it your intention to recontest, and do you have the ongoing support of the board to remain as chairman beyond that?”

Given the support Costello has from the likes of Nick McKenzie and James Chessell for refusing to interfere editorially on Crown or any other story, the irony of this Packer attack on Costello is that it might encourage the other Nine directors to back an extension of his term.

Then again, the disclosure of these Packer payments has undoubtedly damaged Costello, who shouldn’t have accepted them in the first place, let alone kept them secret all these years and then characterised them as having nothing to do with gambling or lobbying.

*This paragraph was removed from the original article after Packer clarified with Crikey that he does not in fact have any PR staff on the books.