ANZ seeks new board chair
The board of directors of ANZ is likely to abandon plans to select Rod Eddington as chair, The Age reported. The board of bank first picked Eddington as the preferred new chair of the bank in November 2008, when Eddington was not even a director of the bank.
John Morschel, a former chief executive of Lend Lease, director at Westpac and long serving director on company boards may be the bank's next choice as chair to replace Charles Goode, who will stand down in February 2009 the newspaper reported.
Other possibilities are David Crawford and David Gonski with Ian Macfarlane (former governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia) as a wildcard choice.
The Financial Review reported a month ago that Eddington was leaning toward turning down the job of chair of the board of the bank, thanks to the burden of having served as a non-executive director of Allco Finance Group, now in liquidation.
In spite of an almost unparalleled reputation from his time an airline executive (at Ansett, Cathay Pacific and British Airways), a busy roster of board seats (at Rio Tinto and News Corp among other tasks) and plenty of contacts in Asia where ANZ wants to expand, the Allco connection may be too difficult for Eddington and the bank to manage.
The Age reported that ANZ consultations with institutional investors confirmed that Eddington's Allco connection remains an issue, as is the continuing investigation by ASIC into the Allco collapse.
Sixty per cent of votes from Australian institutions were cast against Eddington at the recent Rio Tinto annual meeting, and in line with the recommendation of the advisory firm RiskMetrics.
The Financial Review, meanwhile, speculates over the planning at the board of Commonwealth Bank to replace its chair, John Schubert.
Schubert wants to stand down from the board and perhaps seek the corresponding job at BHP Billiton, according to the newspaper, though there are other candidates for that job as well..
Harrison Young, a former executive with Morgan Stanley is the slight favourite to succeed Schubert, according to the AFR followed by former AMP CEO Andrew Mohl.