Sean Smith: Forget the fanfare, Chris Ellison’s position is untenable

There’s no disputing Chris Ellison is a business success story, a high-school dropout who built one of Australia’s biggest miners on hard work, smarts and determination. But there can be no doubt either that no-one but Chris Ellison is to blame for the scandals that have beset Mineral Resources and stripped billions of dollars from its value. To hear some shareholders talk at Thursday’s annual meeting at the West Coast Eagles headquarters in Lathlain named for his mining group, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the former New Zealander is the victim of a media beat-up. Those shareholders, together with some more influential investors, are prioritising money over ethics and want their hard-nosed boss to keep running the miner rather than keep to the company’s plan for him to stand down. As it is, Ellison won’t be going for at least a year anyway, and perhaps not for 18 months, until MinRes has a replacement. Some investors clearly reckon he’s irreplaceable. Others counter he’s no Steve Jobs. However, for all the wealth he has created, and Ellison reminded shareholders on Thursday of his achievements — “I’ve built a great company” — his position is untenable. And MinRes should not be pressured by sections of its shareholder base into changing its mind to let him go. Business ethics and personal conduct should matter, they need to matter. It’s very simple, so simple that seemingly some companies and their bosses still don’t get it. They can’t demand behavioural standards from their employees if they don’t uphold the same standards. The rank hypocrisy of some corporate behaviour, together with a string of scandals, regulatory lawsuits and oversized executive pay packets, is contributing to diminished community trust in Australian big business. No-one expects company bosses to be angels. But neither should those bosses be evading tax and doing myriad deals for personal benefit with the companies they are entrusted with managing on behalf of shareholders. Ellison was contrite on Thursday, talking about the “dark cloud in my life that I will live with forever”. But the real test will be when the time comes for him to hand over the reins to a successor. MinRes itself still appears to be struggling with its commitment to higher standards of governance, insisting on Thursday that a deal done in just May to buy into a Bullsbrook property consortium partly owned by Ellison was not a related party transaction as defined by the rules and hence his involvement did not need to be disclosed. Let’s not quibble. If you’ve been investigating your chief executive’s dealings for two years and are now partnering with him in a deal, why wouldn’t you just come clean with your shareholders?