Life remains far from anodyne at enfeebled dairy processor Murray Goulburn. The company announced on Wednesday morning that chief operating officer Fiona Smith was leaving and her rather imperative lines of responsibility being absorbed by existing members of the management team.
Her biography was expunged from the former co-op's corporate website within moments, but it had long referred to the company secretariat careerist (previously as deputy at BHP Billiton) as having "led the capital structure process to raise $500 million in new capital".
Given that very process is now the subject of a class action before the courts, it was yet another puzzling move by Phil "Stability" Tracy's board to promote Smith from chief lawyer's paper mill to the muddy front line of operations; almost as incongruous as making David Mallinson interim CEO, his role until then being shifting Gary Helou's debt-funded stockpiles of milk powder (plenty of it stuck in warehouses to this day) – the very P&L; absentee that put MG so deep in the cowpat.
The other news is that former bottling exec Mark Clark (geez, some parents are cruel) is joining the board, replacing former ANZ banker Peter Hawkins who steps down after a spectacular run chairing the milker's finance, risk and audit committee.
Clark spent 30 years at Coca-Cola Amatil. The last person to switch from high-fructose corn syrup to mass lactation was Phil Scanlan, spending nearly two decades at CCA before his 1996 appointment as Bonlac CEO, a processor that collapsed after hoarding stock in an ill-fated bet against commodity prices. Guess who Scanlan hired in 1999? Mallinson!
Nearly seven months since Gary the Great took his leave, the crippled agribusiness is still headless, as a shopping list of FMCG talent has turned down the gig.
At this rate Mallinson looks like out-fluking Steven Bradbury. All while competitors continue to pick off MG's best farms, draining nearly a billion litres out of its milk pool (last year's was 3.5 billion). With fixed overheads like theirs, already underutilised factories must close, meaning balance sheet impairments are coming to a balance sheet already more stressed than Jack Lemmon in Save the Tiger. Little wonder candidates aren't banging Tracy's door down.
