Talk about holding all the chips. When Steve McCann walked into the audition for the job of running the desperately troubled casino group Star Entertainment, its chairman, Anne Ward, likely had only one question: how much do you want?This asymmetric negotiating position played out beautifully for McCann, who will get a package of $2.5 million base salary each year and a one-off tasty $7.5 million in bonuses, for signing on and staying there for three years.
seems to have pulled off a great career move twice, fitting for a person who was at one time a world-ranked poker player. Bringing McCann in to fix the broken Star is the best insurance policy the board can buy to ensure the group doesn’t permanently lose its NSW casino licence, which would likely trigger a domino effect on the status of its Queensland licences.McCann was the person put in charge to fix Crown after most of its senior management and its entire board left in the wake of the money laundering scandal.
To be fair, the Crown/Blackstone deal was negotiated before anyone had a real sense of the cost of rehabilitation and fines that Crown or Star would need to endure.But McCann has one particularly valuable attribute. He has a proven ability to deal with casino regulators. He’s a smooth operator. As such, he stands in stark contrast to The Star’s most recent permanent chief executive, Robbie Cooke, and its recently departed chairman, David Foster.