Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [73]
Just before her retirement after 16 years on the Qantas board, seven of which she was chairman, Jackson said reflectively:
If I go back over the APA bid, there’s probably very little else the board could have done. I think we did the right thing in putting it to the shareholders. The share price had been stuck between $3 and $4 for five years. Along came APA and they saw more value than the market did. They made some mistakes in their bid and I’m sure we did as well. The shareholders voted and we moved on. I think we unleashed more value in implementing a lot of things quickly when the bid failed. I think the bid failed because of the underlying strength of the economy and the impact on our results, probably the delay in the consortium’s time horizon and the fact they said it was final and the move in the share price.31
The board asked the management team to stay on with Dixon at its head. It was a difficult time, with Tiger Airways due to add some stiff competition. The management team had to get over the fact that they were not about to personally pocket a major windfall. Dixon said: ‘I think lesser companies and a lesser management team could have imploded. There could have been real problems. They could have taken their eye off the job, but they didn’t.’32 Giving them all bumper pay rises certainly helped them come to terms with it. Coming in with a $1.03 billion pre-tax profit and the promise of $1.3 billion in the next year also helped keep the 141,000 shareholders happy. And the team pushed ahead with cost-cutting and building Jetstar. It was going to be okay.
Reflecting back on the deal he so heartily endorsed, Dixon said: ‘It didn’t happen and I’m very pleased now it didn’t happen and we can get on with our lives.’33
He is not alone. The global financial crisis has taken its toll on the backers of deals like this. Macquarie Bank has cut its executive salaries, Allco has gone into administration, Texas Pacific Group is reeling from bad investments and the major lenders to the deal have been the biggest losers in the economic downturn: Morgan Stanley, Greenwich Capital Markets, Citigroup and Royal Bank of Scotland. With the wisdom of hindsight and knowledge of the global financial crisis, it is easy to see that the players in the botched debt-funded takeover were the men – and woman – who so nearly killed Qantas.
ON 24 JANUARY 2007 English actor Ralph Fiennes, the star of The English Patient, among other highly regarded films, was sitting in seat 2K on the right-hand side of the business-class section of Qantas flight QF123 from Sydney to Mumbai. It was to be a memorable flight. Fiennes was one of only 12 business-class passengers – there was no first-class cabin – for the overnight flight to India. He made himself comfortable, declined dinner from the rather attractive blonde flight attendant and sipped his way through a couple of glasses of shiraz. The flight attendant, Lisa Robertson, certainly noticed the star. As she served him she blurted out: ‘I love your films. I hope you don’t mind me saying this. It’s a little unprofessional of me.’ ‘Not at all. You’re gorgeous,’ Fiennes allegedly replied. ‘There was an instant chemistry between us,’ Robertson told Australian magazine Woman’s Day in a paid interview a month after the flight.1
After a couple of hours the cabin lights were dimmed for passengers to sleep or watch movies. As 38-year-old Robertson