Main players ignore script
January 29, 2009
This story by Ian McIlwraith appeared in The Age on November 28, 2008, after Telstra's AGM
THERE was a point during yesterday's Telstra meeting when investors were told the board had decided against "election" speeches by directors facing a vote.
Yet, half an hour before Telstra ran what was probably the country's biggest shareholder gathering, chairman Donald McGauchie and chief executive Sol Trujillo were out pressing the flesh of investors against a backdrop of the company's high-tech gadgets.
It was straight out of the politician's handbook, and provided great "vision" for the media. The camera crews and photographers had to come early anyway, because Telstra keeps picture-taking media on a short leash and controls the visual and audio feeds from its meetings.
Even after the 31/2-hour gathering of about 1000 investors had ended, McGauchie and Trujillo were still talking to a handful of shareholders at Melbourne's Convention Centre - although Telstra's army of ear-plugged, grey-suited security staff outnumbered them.
In its 11th year of public life, Telstra has the annual meeting down to a finely controlled art - soft blue backgrounds to mellow the crowd, an obvious security presence to steer them, a strictly regimented question and answer session, and lengthy briefings before anything substantive comes up for discussion.
How scripted? Well, when Trujillo produced what appeared to be an ad hoc follow-up to an investor query, a share price chart measuring Telstra's outperformance against two suffering international competitors was projected behind him within a fraction of a second. Then again, the projected slide for the re-election of directors nominated David, rather than Donald McGauchie, as a boardroom candidate.
As shareholder activist Stephen Mayne pointed out, the meeting had been running for more than two hours (thanks to the bad cop, good cop, cop giving really boring evidence routines of McGauchie, Trujillo and remuneration committee chief Charles Macek) before shareholders asked a question, or a vote was taken. By then half the audience had drifted out.
In that filibuster, McGauchie's 40-minute address largely consisted of a firm boot to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's collective groin and digging Telstra's heels further in by refusing to bid for the right to build Australia's broadband network unless the Government lets it own it, too.
Trujillo spent longer saying he loved the company, customers, staff, shareholders, the sharemarket and new technology, showing videos proving his case and delivering terabytes of statistics and acronyms.
He made it clear he didn't love separating its infrastructure from its operations; or the English language - telling shareholders the company had "architected" its business for a high-speed world.
It was only when former CSIRO chief John Stocker became acting chairman, while McGauchie faced re-election, that the meeting deviated from the script.
Only McGauchie, Trujillo, the company secretary and chief financial officer sat on stage. The other non-executive directors sat in the body of the meeting.
Mayne demanded the board candidates stand up and speak up for themselves. Stocker declined and the remaining crowd booed loudly. It didn't matter - the proxies were in and the votes were overwhelmingly in the company's favour.
Copyright © 2024 The Mayne Report. All rights reserved
