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.

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His task was to rehabilitate the company, fix its culture, put in processes to enhance know-your-customer requirements and fix lax controls over problem gamblers, among other things. His was a clean-up job of epic proportions.

In March this year, the Victorian gaming regulator declared Crown was fit to hold a casino licence.

McCann, however, left Crown in mid-2022 after it was taken over by giant US investment outfit Blackstone.

He walked away from that gig with an estimated $9 million for a little more than a year’s work.

Now he seems to have pulled off a great career move twice, fitting for a person who was at one time a world-ranked poker player.

He negotiated a remuneration package at Crown that included what amounted to career danger money, $5.2 million in sign-on performance rights, for which he would become eligible in the event of a change of control. The marvellous part of the deal McCann negotiated is that he would also receive the performance rights even if he remained at Crown.

The beauty of the Star remuneration package is that it mirrors the terms he negotiated with Crown.

If Star is the subject of a change of control (acquired by someone), then McCann gets all his bonuses and sails into the sunset with a bulging wallet.

Shareholders won’t begrudge McCann this clause. He managed to negotiate such an immensely good price for Crown shareholders – a price that has left its new owners, Blackstone, looking silly for overpaying.

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.

Selling Star at anything but a bargain-basement price would be quite the achievement.

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.

They will go down in history for picking a fight with the NSW casino regulator and entertaining a thought bubble for a class action against it - in response to Cooke’s belief that the company was under assault from the body that monitors its rehabilitation process.

Now we have McCann in The Star role, we get to see if he can fire the oven for a second souffle to rise.

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