TPG's Game of Phones
The back channels of Sydney’s upper echelons, open for one afternoon.
Somewhere in Sydney a man is on hold to his phone company. Maroon 5, "She Will Be Loved." He has his doubts. Somewhere inside TPG, he understands, his $50 spent two years in a suspense account. Nobody journalled it.
He emailed the chief executive. Silence. He went on the radio. The communications team went on his Instagram, on a weekend, to inspect his unagi. A polite follow-up got him the lawyers in six days. The next afternoon, by the account he was given at work, the chief executive of a $7.5 billion company found time to pick up the phone. Had it been to him, it would have been the fastest response he had had from Vodafone in two years. It went, he was told, to a shareholder of his employer who sat on TPG's own charity board. He was never meant to find out, a top-ranked employment lawyer later told him. These things are done behind closed doors. For one afternoon, the back channels of Sydney’s upper echelons were left ajar.
The investigator was a former partner of the law firm that won TPG its merger. The man said to have received the call was at the firm across the table. History rhymes, and occasionally it bills by the hour. TPG closed its inquiry without an outcome, which in the trade is a dropped call. Two regulators have since opened files of their own. Theirs will be a longer call.
When somebody finally came back on the line, the music had changed. John Mayer. It spoke to his soul. Nothing else at TPG had.
§Previously filed
Quo Vadis first set out the foundation board, the investigator, the second man in the interview room and the closing of the inquiry. This piece returns to all of them, with more on each, as part of the whole chronology: the two years before the call, the week of it, the weekend after it, the journalist, and what TPG and its lawyers have said since.
Wednesday
Clinton Maynard's Drive programme on 2GB is not, as a rule, where ASX 200 companies go to learn about themselves.
On the afternoon of Wednesday 8 October 2025 it was where a Vodafone customer spent part of his day explaining to Sydney how a $50 billing error had turned into fourteen months of collections activity and an account flag the company would not remove. The host listened for about as long as it takes to recognise a pattern, and offered a comparison of his own.
"It shouldn't be this hard to get the billing right for people," he said. Then, warming to it: "It almost sounds like Robodebt Mark II."
Somebody at TPG was listening too, or at least looking. Over the weekend that followed, while the rest of Sydney was at the beach or the pub, the customer's personal Instagram stories were being viewed by accounts in the names of two of the purple palace's finest: Anthony Giannopoulos, an external communications specialist at TPG, and Mitchell Bingemann, its head of external communications. On a weekend, mind you. Weekends at TPG, it seems, are for homework.
What they found was a rather good plate of unagi. The analytics record that TPG's communications staff had a good look. It is the most engagement the customer has ever had from Vodafone.
He kept the screenshots, because by then he was the kind of customer who keeps screenshots.
