Qantas’ Jackson gets Eddington’s backing
Geoff Easdown in a report in the Herald Sun this morning says Qantas’ chairman Margaret Jackson has been encouraged to resist growing pressure for her resignation ahead of this morning’s board meeting.
Leading company director and aviation veteran Sir Rod Eddington told the Melbourne Press Club yesterday she should stay in the top job, saying, “I don’t think Margaret Jackson should go for a moment”, noting that she is “a very good chair” of one of the world’s few successful aviation companies.
“I think she has done a terrific job and so has Geoff Dixon,” he added, referring also to the long serving Qantas chief executive.
Both Ms Jackson and Mr Dixon face mounting criticism for the way they backed the recent attempt by Airline Partners Australia to buy the national airline.
They are expected to be questioned by Qantas directors during today’s board meeting.
Ms Jackson last week said the board must now set a new growth strategy for Qantas to continue as a public company.
One of the key tasks will be to find a way to tap global financial markets without breaching foreign ownership restrictions.
Yesterday, Sir Rod told the lunchtime audience that, when APA pitched the bid, Qantas directors “quite rightly” described it as reasonable.
Management also had not feared the role private equity would have played.
Before responding to questions about Ms Jackson, Sir Rod declared that he was a director of Allco Finance, one of the bid partners and that he was not involved in the Qantas play.
In his former role, as chief executive of British Airways, Sir Rod served with Ms Jackson and Mr Dixon on the Qantas board when the British carrier held a 25 per cent interest in Qantas.
During his 28-year airline career – an industry which he described yesterday as both “tough and brutal” – Sir Rod was chief executive of Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific and later executive chairman of Melbourne based Ansett from 1997 to 2000.
Of his time at Ansett, he said his preferred option would have been to sell the the local carrier to Singapore Airlines, but “that’s not the way it worked out”.
He also has previously describer Ansett and the airline business as, “great airline, lousy business”.
Asked what went wrong with APA’s buyout offer he replied that unlike Coles, now being duchessed by private equity, Qantas was an Australian icon, adding, “Icons have a special place in people’s hearts and that makes bidding for an icon by another entity a much more difficult affair.”
He said that when APA put forward its offer last December, the market was nearly 20% lower than it was at the end of the journey.
“Airlines are always a heady mix of finance, politics and all the customer service things that swirl around,” Sir Rod said, adding, “I always thought it was going to be a complicated journey, but I did not think it was going to finish in the way it did.”
Qantas shares rose 1c yesterday to $5.28
Report by The Mole and the Herald Sun
John Alwyn-Jones
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