All very interesting.
The following , as best as I can remember , relayed to me at a dinner party sometime ago might be worth running up the flag pole to check veracity.
If any of the following is anyway close to truth , it paints the “wee one” in a very poor light.
Alledgedly, so the story goes , when the smartest guys in the room created the Terminal decline myth in order to destroy the share price (only genius’ could achieve that with high load factors ,apparently !)
Then locking in future performance bonus’ at the created depressed price , they got a bit nervous about a potential hostile takeover due to the now favourable price / equity ratio for such an attempt.
Apparently there was a group , the same old suspects , Dixon,Gregg, Carniege , Singo et al ,alledgedly trying to borrow Dubai money to finance a hostile takeover.
Some months after this group started circling , old Clark from Qantas’ mates ? at Emirates came a calling with a summons for the Wee One to meet at their Hidden Valley resort , in the Blue Mountains.
From that meeting Qantas ended up with the Emirates /Qantas overlord alliance ?
Low and behold the hostile takeover group faded away .
From all that , one can only assume Clarke used the information to leverage a deal that the Wee One couldn’t say no to , in exchange for pulling the finance on the takeover deal for Dixon and his mates.
Around this time the media released pictures of the little fellow and old scroats having quite a heated tęte-ŕ-tęte.
Soon after the transformation started in earnest and the International section that was in terminal decline and their fleet was wound back quite dramatically.
It was alledged that all the aircraft that were disposed of for this transformation ( the 747 + 767’s) were all aircraft leased by the fellow with the saggy ball sack monicker.
Was this a vindictive payback by the Wee One for the attempted hostile takeover and the untenable position this placed him in with his new middle eastern overlord masters ?
Who knows , but makes for interesting conjecture, non the less !