John Mullen, eight days a week
It seems governance norms don't apply to the TWE, Qantas and Brambles chairman.
Treasury Wine Estates shareholders were made to doubt their own sanity at the company's annual meeting on Thursday morning in Melbourne.
Both the Australian Shareholders' Association (representing retail shareholders) and major institutional proxy adviser ISS were recommending against the re-election of chairman John Mullen, which Mullen was none too pleased about, despite being returned comfortably with 86 per cent of the vote. "I have to say," Mullen told the AGM, "I scratch my head at a time when the company is going through everything that it's going through".
TWE's share price has virtually halved in the past 12 months, while in May it announced the departure of CEO Tim Ford (his successor Sam Fischer starts later this month). Earlier this week, Treasury also announced a nasty profit downgrade.
This was the second consecutive year that ISS recommended against Mullen at TWE, which it argued was "warranted… on the basis of overboarding concerns".[[Most public company directors in Australia face re-election every three years but the constitution of Treasury Wine Estates mandates the annual election of its directors.]] In addition to chairing Treasury, Mullen chairs Qantas and Brambles, while also serving as a non-executive director of NYSE-listed Brookfield Infrastructure Corporation. Those are just his public company directorships. Additionally, he chairs Scyne Advisory, the emergency spin-off of PwC's consulting arm.[[The Scyne role was included in Mullen's biography in TWE's 2024 annual report but disappeared from his bio in the 2025 report.]]