In the hours before KPMG Australia went public with news that its chairman Martin Sheppard would head for the door, David Luff, the former media adviser to John Howard and veteran crisis communications consultant, was working the phones.
Our best bet is Luff had probably hoped the bloodletting came sooner – after all, he’s had plenty of practice. Since Howard, Luff has gone on to work with all manner of major companies, including Telstra, Rio Tinto, Optus, and Nine Entertainment, owner of this masthead.
Now he’s one of the people trying to pull KPMG out of a months-long nosedive.
The latest of those efforts came on Tuesday, when it announced that Sheppard would head for the door, to be replaced by an independent chairman. It also said the firm would do a bunch of stuff to learn from its mistakes so as to never make them again. Two other senior partners, Paul Rogers and former chief operating officer Eileen Hoggett, will also leave the partnership.
There were not one but two external reviews announced as part of the latest house-clearing: The first, KPMG said in its announcement, would look at the firm’s whistleblowing system and the “broader cultural context” that affects effective whistleblowing.
That review will be run by Principia Advisory, a UK firm that KPMG Australia has previously worked with, and which in a 2024 “Ethics Study” bragged about KPMG Australia adopting its “Ethical Culture Index” to monitor the – wait for it – “health of ethical culture” and track “...
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