Quo Vadis
He counsels the UN on governance. At home, both sides of the cheque.
For five consecutive years the largest grant from a listed telco's charitable foundation went to the same medical research institute. Some $2.24 million. One of the foundation's own directors sat on the board of the charity that raises money for that institute, and held both seats for eight years. Across the four in which the grants continued, forty-three cents in every dollar the foundation gave away went to the one recipient. The reports record the amounts to the dollar. On the overlap, they are quieter.
He advises the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund on governance, and he is a LinkedIn Top Voice. Beside him on that foundation board sat the telco's General Counsel, its designated Whistleblower Protection Officer. A disclosure was acknowledged on a Thursday. The telephone rang on the Friday. He had no views. Seven months later there is a second lunch, twelve to one in a basement, booked by the chief executive of a company he co-founded, for the two of them, four days before that chief executive was due to give his account of events elsewhere. The Financial Review prints its lunches down to the macchiato. That bill was not printed.
This article concerns two lunches.
The first took place at a hundred-year-old restaurant on Dean Street in Soho, where the Australian Financial Review took John Nicholas ('Nick') Abrahams to eat oysters and talk about artificial intelligence. It cost £147. The column printed the bill, as that column always does, down to the macchiato.
The second took place in a basement in the Sydney central business district, at a seafood counter about five metres long, in a building that has been keeping confidences since before either diner was admitted to practice.
It was booked for twelve to one on a Thursday by the chief executive of a company Mr Abrahams co-founded, for himself and Mr Abrahams.
Nobody printed that bill.
The Soho lunch produced several thousand words in a national masthead and did not establish a single thing about its subject that he had not already put on his own website.
The Sydney lunch is not mentioned in it. The Sydney lunch is not mentioned anywhere.