Rear Window
Singtel’s board gets front-row seat to Optus debacle – again
The Optus CEO was once more planning a week with her board. She has much more on her plate now.
Myriam Robin and Mark Di StefanoOptus chief Kelly Bayer Rosmarin is the Australian-based chief of a company owned by a Singaporean giant. She should, ideally, have an unusual level of distance from her boss’ bosses, visible to them primarily in occasional board briefings and earnings figures, the governor of a foreign outpost only noticed when in crisis.
She’s on their radar now. And it’s even more excruciating than you think.
Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was meant to be hosting a Singtel board delegation this week. Dallas Kilponen
She and Optus chairman Paul O’Sullivan were, this week, hosting the entirety of the Singtel board. It’s mostly Singaporean-based delegation are in Australia for the first time since late September 2022. And yes, the earlier visit coincided with the last time Bayer Rosmarin was overseeing a major crisis at the network, when cybercriminals hacked its customer data to steal the identifying information of four in 10 Australians. What are the odds?!
At least this time there isn’t a fancy gala at the Art Gallery of New South Wales to cancel in light of mounting customer fury.
Now, to have the Singaporean heavies in town while the network spectacularly fails is obviously very, very bad. The board now have a front-row seat to an unfolding PR disaster.
Rather than hold a press conference, Bayer Rosmarin called into Sydney’s ABC radio, via WhatsApp (obviously she’s an Optus customer), to address anxious customers and mid-morning ABC radio listeners about the issue.
Meanwhile, on social media where people with jobs were most likely to be, Optus used Facebook and Twitter to put out a totally anodyne “important message”. It switched off comments, lest the more than half a million followers sounded off in anger. She who controls the airwaves controls the message, and General Bayer Rosmarin is keeping a lid on this one.
Kept in the dark
Too bad Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has a microphone too.
It’s widely known in Canberra circles the minister dislikes holding pressers, which is why holding her own nationally broadcast event on Wednesday morning to repeatedly call for Optus to “step up” in communicating was significant.
Rowland clearly feels she’s been kept in the dark, whether from Bayer Rosmarin or the company’s government affairs suit Andrew Sheridan (who ironically is also on the board of the telco ombudsman) or its numerous lobbyists (the telco currently has three separate lobbying outfits on retainer, including former communication minister Stephen Conroy’s TG Public Affairs). Rowland couldn’t answer any basic questions about the outage, which means the press conference had an intended audience of one: the Optus CEO.
As for Singtel’s head honchos, they saw first-hand how Bayer Rosmarin handled things 12 months ago and were surely assured many lessons were learned. They now have a chance to verify that, while being brutally exposed to precisely how the rest of Australia thinks she’s doing (we hope they enjoyed details of REA director Bayer Rosmarin’s trip to Europe, taken with the rest of that company’s board, being reported in this column on Tuesday).
The intended purpose of Singtel’s Australian board trip was to conduct a series of scheduled meetings with stakeholders, though who knows how many of those are going ahead now. Sitting around the board table are several Singaporean sovereign wealth types and a few familiar faces, like former Westpac chief Gail Kelly and former Westpac CFO John Arthur, who is presently also the chairman of the Sydney Metro.
This is some luck: unlike their Melbourne counterparts, Sydney’s trains were, on Wednesday morning, still running.
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