KPMG chair-elect admits to sending ‘naive, embarrassing and wrong’ email

KPMG’s chairman-elect Michael Ebeid has issued a grovelling apology to Labor senator Deborah O’Neill over his emails claiming her speech, which brought whistleblower allegations against the firm to light, contained “completely false” information.

Ebeid, who has essentially been functioning as the chairman of the firm that is trying to recover from its top executives’ misuse of clients’ confidential audit documents, needs approval from KPMG partners to formally take up the role. That vote ends on Wednesday.

Documents released by O’Neill’s parliamentary committee on Monday contained Ebeid’s personal apology for an email he sent early in the saga, which began this year, undermining the whistleblower’s claims.

“What I wrote was wrong,” Ebeid told O’Neill in one document. “I described statements about the whistleblower’s allegations made by you to the Senate as false. I described the firm’s process as thorough. Events since have shown that neither was true, and that the concerns you raised on the whistleblower’s behalf have helped uncover serious wrongdoing and I can only thank you for that.”

He said he thought he was being helpful, based on his knowledge at the time. “However, with what I know now, my email was naive, embarrassing and wrong on every level,” Ebeid wrote.

More to come.

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