Roger Corbett deeply exposed in Endeavour attack

Of all the bizarre happenings to arise from Bruce Mathieson’s falling out with the board of pubs and liquor giant Endeavour, perhaps nothing is as strange as the passionate involvement of former Woolies chief Roger Corbett.

This is a man whose stints as a public market chairman leave him deeply exposed when bashing others for declining share prices. Not that he seems to think so.

Endeavour is well off from its peak. This catastrophe has roused the patrician Corbett to turn AGM brawler. He threw Endeavour’s 40 per cent fall at Woolworths chair Scott Perkins last week, asking him how much worse it had to get before Woolworths used Endeavour’s stake to shake things up. Later, he used it to bash Endeavour’s chairman Peter Hearl. “You need to go, forthwith,” Corbett told Hearl in his most Shakespearean tones at Tuesday’s AGM. “I call for your immediate resignation.”

Of course, when Corbett talks about a 40 per cent decline, he doesn’t mean over Hearl’s tenure. He means from Endeavour’s peak in August last year.

Endeavour’s share price since its demerger from Woolworths and Hearl’s appointment in 2021 has been parabolic, rising strongly in its first year before reversing course. It looks, in fact, like a less dramatic version of what happened at generic drugmaker Mayne Pharma, where Mathieson was a director from 2007 to 2021, the last 10 years with Corbett as his chairman. During the latter’s tenure, the share price declined 56 per cent.