Glenn Stevens, numbers guy
The former RBA governor is ill-equipped to chair an institution like Macquarie.
Thursday morning was an inglorious but defining moment for Macquarie Group chairman Glenn Stevens. After shareholders delivered a first strike against the remuneration report at the company's AGM, he defended his tin ear on the basis that "I mightn't have been very effective, but I wasn't asleep at the wheel."
Both Stevens and CEO Shemara Wikramanayake offered uncompelling justifications for why Wikramanayake, not Stevens, was phoning Macquarie's large shareholders about the remuneration report in the days prior to the AGM. "We did all the normal things," Stevens told the meeting. "In fact, we did a bit more than we probably normally do. And Shemara did what she did."
Joe Aston
In another astonishing exchange, Stevens was asked by a retail shareholder why "Macquarie's shares [are] underperforming for about three years against the broader market?"
"I'm not sure they are underperforming over that period against the broader market actually," Stevens responded. "The share price has more or less gone up with the market over that time. And I'd note that it's today 26 per cent higher than it was on this day three years ago… so we don't underperform, or at least we have not thus far…"