"I expected him to answer the questions with conviction and...

"I expected him to answer the questions with conviction and candour.......................but he didn't do that, in my opinion."

You're right; he didn't.

But - while I'm no apologist for Kelaher [*] - I strongly suspect that the reason he didn't respond to the questions with conviction and candour is because he didn't know the answers.

I mean, the nature and tone of the questions deal with highly specific points; literally, what exactly was relayed by who, to who else, and when and how?

I think some context is warranted in this sort of situation: the matter being drilled into here was a relatively minor one in terms of materiality, and - consequently - one in which the CEO did not become overly engaged.

Yet he is being called on to answer questions that contain a high degree of detail granularity, and the only way he could comprehensively answering those questions is if he had a day-to-day handling of the incident in question. An incident which, recall, happened almost a decade ago, and for which remediation was finalised more than 5 years ago.

This guy probably has thousands of personal interactions and pieces of information and come across his desk every year, so it is unsurprising, I think, that he can't accurately answer questions of the detailed nature that being directed at him.

Sure, as investors, we would far prefer it if the companies in which we invest operate on a zero error way. But I put it to anyone that all enterprises - private, public, large, medium, small, whatever size, shape or nature - will operate with some or other error rate.

And, sure, we would prefer it if errors, when detected, are remedied promptly and appropriately. Most times, they probably are; but sometimes they are not.

But that's just the nature of the enterprise beast - you can bet London to a brick that enterprises in the activities of telecommunications, mining, agriculture, transport, manufacturing, distribution, technology, government and public administration are at this very moment committing some sort of errors of administrative, bureaucratic, procedural, systems or human judgement.

This Commission could re-convene every five years, and it would each time have a basket things about which to question company executives.

Don't get me wrong; it would be fantastic if all mistakes could be eliminated at source, and we should always strive for continual improvement, but for practical reasons, a zero rate is never going to happen.


[*] I think he is commercially aggressive (he would need to be in order to drive the cost structure of the business as hard and effectively as he has). In fact, in many ways, given the genesis and history of the company, in some way I am surprised there have not been more issues of a systems shortcomings nature.