The bond between Fahour and Jeanne Pratt has strengthened. Credit:Courtesy of the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce. In fact, Fahour is the federal government's best-paid employee. In the year to June 2013, his remuneration was almost $4.8 million, compared to the prime minister's $507,000. In 2014, he pocketed $4.6 million, but it could have been much more: he passed up the opportunity to take home an incentive payment, instead asking the Australia Post board to donate $2.85 million on his behalf to the Islamic Museum of Australia, an institution founded by his brother. In the latest financial year, when Australia Post lost money for the first time in more than three decades and Fahour announced that close to 2000 jobs would be axed, he undertook to share the pain by forgoing another bonus of more than $2 million. "I'm the CEO and I have to lead by example," he tells me. But praise for the gesture has been muted. "It's like telling the homeless that you're empathising with them by turning down your electric blanket," an anonymous Australia Post worker wrote on the website of the socialist newspaper, Red Flag. It seems to Adam Schwab, author of Pigs at the Trough: Lessons from Australia's Decade of Corporate Greed, that with or without bonuses, Fahour is too handsomely rewarded. How extraordinary, Schwab says, "that Australian taxpayers pay more than $4 million each year to someone to run a publicly owned utility that is performing terribly". And that Fahour is paid many times more than the head of the US Postal Service. In Schwab's opinion, "Fahour's salary isn't merely high, it's completely off the scale." Fahour has dark eyes, olive skin and steel-grey hair. "Gorgeous," says Louise Adler, chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing and chair of the board of Melbourne's Methodist Ladies' College (MLC), the school attended by his daughters. "We call him the George Clooney of Australia." I know what she means, but when I sit down with Fahour at Australia Post's headquarters in the central city one afternoon, what strikes me most is his larger-than-life quality. The room in which we meet is a decent size, yet he seems to take up most of the space in it. His hand gestures are extravagant, his conversation so impassioned that the freedom to raise stamp prices starts to sound like a principle for which you would go to the barricades. Discussing his level of remuneration, he makes clear that he considers it no more than his due. If anything, he thinks Australians are getting his services at a bargain rate. He is paid "a very attractive sum", he allows, "but it's a lot less than I used to earn." The same goes for many of the talented people he has hired. "The team and I knew that we could stay in the commercial world and earn a lot more money somewhere else if we wanted to," he says. "But we chose to be here because we're doing something we think is very important." (Twenty of his executives are on packages worth more than $500,000, four of them earning more than $1.2 million each.)

Fahour with John Stewart during his time at the National Australia Bank. Credit:Jessica Shapiro Australia Post is at a pivotal point in its history. The parcels side of the business is booming, thanks to the growth in online shopping, but overall profitability has been declining because we are sending fewer and fewer letters. Last financial year, for the first time, the income from parcels was outweighed by losses on ordinary mail. Fahour's task is to reverse the slide into the red and remodel the postal corporation to ensure its survival in the digital era. "What a challenge!" he says, with the air of a man who believes that if anyone can do it, he can. Fahour once wore a cream suit to the Melbourne Cup. Shock waves rippled through the members' enclosure at Flemington but, if you have enough chutzpah, it probably feels only natural to turn heads. "He wouldn't have been thinking, 'Hang on a minute, I don't look like I fit in here,' " says Mark Joiner, a long-time friend. "It wouldn't have crossed his mind." Australia Post chief executive Ahmed Fahour wants Australians to pay up if they're late to collect parcels. Credit:Jesse Marlow Those who know Fahour say he is more than comfortable in the spotlight (though he takes a lot of persuading to be interviewed for this story). At Australia Post, he is a highly visible chief executive, known for the stirring speeches he gives his 36,000 employees at worksites around the country. "He has real magnetism that is undeniable and rare," says Jane McMillan, who was one of his senior staffers before leaving in 2013 to head Tony Abbott's media office. None of the politicians McMillan encountered during her stint in Canberra worked a crowd better than Fahour. Accompanying him on a national roadshow, she says, was "kind of like walking around with a rock star".

Fahour is aware of his singularity. "Throughout my career, people have commented on how driven and focused I am," he says. To former Australia Post executive Tracey Fellows, what is remarkable is his stamina: "He's strong-willed and he's passionate, like, all the time. He's always on." Fellows was the Singapore-based Asia Pacific president of Microsoft when Fahour approached her about joining the postal corporation. She says she had no intention of taking up the offer, and agreed to meet him only to be polite. "I walked away from that interview saying, 'Wow, I now want this job'. He is an incredibly inspiring individual." He's a great guy. And he's hugely talented. Unfortunately, his drive is so strong that he knocks people out of the way. Technology executive Maha Krishnapillai is another who found himself unable to resist Fahour's advances. "His enthusiasm is so infectious," Krishnapillai says. "He said, 'I'm going to get the brightest executives from all around the economy.' " Among them were colleagues from NAB, where his band of loyal lieutenants had been known as Team Ahmed. "He needed people around him he could trust," says a former NAB executive. "The Team Ahmed members went across with him because the reality was they had to shake up the Australia Post culture, and you can't do that from within. You need new people." Almost everyone agrees change was overdue at Australia Post, but some contend Fahour would have benefited from keeping on more people who understood the complexities of running a postal service. Even before the latest round of redundancies, he had cut 900 jobs, most of them from head office. "He's driven out the old managers who knew what they were doing," says Joan Doyle, the Communication Workers Union's former Victorian branch secretary. "All that corporate knowledge and experience has gone out the door." Among those to leave was Australia Post's head of corporate development, Terry Sinclair, who had been considered the leading internal candidate for the chief executive's job. "I was asked after Terry departed whether I was an Ahmed man or a Terry man," says a former manager, who realised he was expected to declare loyalty to the new regime. "This was by the head of HR. I said, 'Actually I consider myself an Australia Post man.' And I think at that point my cards were marked."

The former manager says changing the guard at Australia Post was a considerable drain on the corporate coffers. "I was there for seven years," he says. "The combination of my redundancy payment and superannuation was worth three-quarters of a million. And I wasn't one of the highly paid executives. Some of the guys who had been there 15 or 20 years would have needed Armaguard to pick up their pay-out. The cost of Ahmed's desire to restructure the organisation and bring in his own team would have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars." Some of Fahour's high-profile recruits – including Tracey Fellows and Maha Krishnapillai – have left. Fellows, who stayed only 18 months, says there were no hard feelings: she simply accepted a tempting offer to run real-estate listings business REA Group. But a fellow former Australia Post executive includes her in a list of people who were "acquired extremely expensively, under-utilised and then lost". By most accounts, working with Fahour is not always easy. A former colleague, describing him as astonishingly clever, adds: "He has an ego you cannot climb over." Says another: "He's not particularly patient with people who aren't as smart as he is. And he's not necessarily very patient with things that don't happen as quickly as he would like." Criticisms like these seem to Fahour a little unfair. "Name any human being in any industry who has never raised their voice," he says. "It's not because I'm a malicious or angry person. It's because I've got a sense of urgency about what I'm trying to do." Those who encounter him away from the office tend to be beguiled. "He's relentlessly charming," says broadcaster and columnist Waleed Aly. "You know when you meet someone who always seems to pick up the right cue and say the right thing at the right time? He's extremely good at that."

Aly, who is 12 years Fahour's junior, remembers being inspired by his success in the corporate world. "Muslims had very few role models," Aly says. "The first time, as a young Muslim, you stumbled on his story, it had the power to change your perspective on your own life and what it could be. It was almost unbelievable. Almost like, 'How did that happen?' " A couple of years ago, Fahour paid a reported $20 million for Invergowrie, a gracious old bluestone house in Hawthorn built for Sir James Palmer, the first speaker of the Victorian Legislative Council. In the garage is a Maserati he rarely drives. But Aly has never found him pretentious: "He feels very self-made in the sense that he built what he is from the ground up. What comes with that is a kind of egalitarianism." I say there seems to me something quite glamorous about Fahour. "Yeah, but I can still see the wog in him," Aly says. The oldest of eight children of Lebanese immigrants, Fahour was three years old when he and his parents came to Australia in 1969. The family subsequently moved into a terrace house in Lygon Street, Carlton, and his mother, Siham, opened a Middle Eastern bakery on the ground floor. Fahour spent Saturday mornings working behind the counter at Damascus Sweets and says he ate so much baklava that some of the profits went on dentists' bills. (His teeth are now Clooneyesque in their whiteness and evenness). His father, Abdul, was seriously injured in 1976 when a tram crashed into the family car. Fahour explains that Siham ran both the household and the business, getting up in the dark to make pastries each morning, while Abdul spent months recovering in hospital, then a year convalescing at home. "She had all these kids, she had the shop, she had a sick husband ..." Fahour falters, overcome by emotion. His parents are very important to him, he says. "Especially my mum." Mark Joiner believes Fahour is propelled by two forces. First, "He's got this innate, very strong self- belief." Second, "He carries that pressure of the eldest son in an ethnic family, where you're almost like a second father to all your siblings." Fahour agrees with this assessment: "As the first boy of an immigrant family, so much rests on your shoulders. You can't fail." Your parents, your sisters, your brothers - all are relying on you. When you succeed, as you must, "you bring everybody with you".

Fahour excelled at school and graduated from Melbourne's La Trobe University with a first-class honours degree in economics, later adding an MBA to his credentials. In 1987, when Joiner started working at the management consultancy Pappas Carter Evans and Koop (acquired in 1990 by Boston Consulting Group), 20-year-old Fahour was already there. "I thought he was a significant player in the firm, because of the way he carried himself," Joiner says. "I was thinking, 'This guy's a bit of a hot-shot, obviously'. They said, 'No, he joined yesterday.' " It soon became clear that Fahour was a divisive character. "Some people didn't want to work with him and others saw enormous value in him," Joiner says. He could be abrasive. "For example, when we were doing some work in New Zealand, he was pushing a line with a client and the client kept pushing back. Eventually Ahmed lost his cool and said, 'Look, I've told you three times. If you're too stupid to get it ...' " Joiner was dismayed. "I thought, 'That's a disaster.' But he and the guy played tennis that night and they're lifelong friends." George Pappas, one of the consultancy's founders, says the young Fahour "perhaps didn't quite understand the subtleties of how you behave with older people. Let's just say that Ahmed was not short of self-confidence." Now chancellor of Victoria University, Pappas liked Fahour and thought he was brilliant but knew that others found him infuriating. "I had to intercede on his behalf on a number of occasions." By the time he was 30, Fahour was a director of the Australian arm of Boston Consulting Group. Three years later, in 2000, he moved to New York to take up the plum post of head of corporate development at Citigroup, then the world's largest bank. He went on to run its global investments. "I sat on the executive committee," he says, "and I learnt from the masters of the universe, as they were called back then."

He was on his way to work in midtown Manhattan when the planes hit the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. Talking on the phone to a friend in Australia as he came out of the subway, Fahour took a while to realise that something terrible had happened. "People were going crazy, but I thought it was normal New York crazy." By 2004, he was ready to return to Australia with his wife, Dionnie, and their three children (they later had a fourth). "I loved America," he says, "but I wanted my kids to grow up with Australian values. So I said to my wife, 'What's more important? Family or career?' " After six months as chief executive of Citibank Australia, he moved to NAB as chief executive of its Australian operations. His package, including $13.5 million just for signing on, was worth up to $34 million over four years. Retired NAB boss Nobby Clark told fellow shareholders at the 2005 annual general meeting that Fahour had been paid more in his first three months at the bank than Clark had taken home in four decades. "He is obviously an excellent negotiator," Clark said. What few knew was that Fahour had worked at NAB previously. As a boy, he had occasionally spent evenings helping his father clean commercial premises, including some of the bank's branches in Melbourne's northern suburbs.

Mark Joiner recalls a conversation he had with Fahour at NAB's head office: "We were walking through the car park underneath the building one day, and he said, 'That's so-and-so.' It was the guy who emptied the bins. I said, 'You know everybody.' And he said, 'Well, they're all just people. It doesn't matter what title they have or where they come from.' " Though he improved NAB's results, not everyone appreciated Fahour's presence. "He came to the bank in a kind of Liberace blast," says one former senior executive. Says another, remembering the antagonism he aroused in some quarters: "It wasn't his capability or his performance; it was his style. Ahmed is a classic alpha male. He had a very blunt and brash manner, and that did not endear him to the old-timers on the NAB board. He used to swear a lot, and that didn't go down well at all." When Fahour was hired and appointed to the board, it had been widely assumed that he would eventually succeed John Stewart as group chief executive. "But the board, like everybody else in Ahmed's life, divided," Joiner says. "There were people who thought, 'Why would we consider anybody else?' And there were people who thought, 'This is a blue-chip Australian institution. We couldn't have someone like that running it.' " John Stewart tells me he liked and respected Fahour: "He's a great guy. And he's hugely talented." At the same time, Stewart was aware of Fahour's capacity to put some colleagues offside. "Unfortunately, his drive is so strong that he knocks people out of the way." According to Stewart, careful consideration was given to how Fahour would be likely to handle promotion: "CEOs get lots of compliments and you really have to be grounded – live your life in a normal way and not believe the propaganda from other people. I think that was always a worry from the board. They thought that perhaps he could find the fame and the power too much." In the end, the top job went to Cameron Clyne, head of NAB's New Zealand operations. Stewart says he still isn't sure whether it was the right decision.

In November 2008, a few months after Fahour lost the contest to Clyne, NAB raised capital by placing 150 million shares on the market at $20 each. A week earlier, Fahour had sold 130,000 of his shares for $24.78 each, making $3.2 million. By selling before the placement was announced, he had maximised his return. Eyebrows were raised over the timing of the transaction, but the bank issued a statement insisting no rules had been broken. Fahour quit soon afterwards and headed for Bahrain, where he spent six months running a Middle Eastern bank, Gulf Finance House, before returning to Melbourne and accepting the Australia Post job. Desperate times call for drastic measures. At least, that's the way Fahour sees it. As a result of his lobbying, Federal Parliament is scheduled to debate the introduction of a two-tier mail system. Already approved by cabinet, it would mean delivery times lengthening for all but premium-priced, first-class mail. Fahour has also applied to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to increase the price of a standard stamp from 70c to $1. His aim, he says, is to stem Australia Post's losses on letters while continuing to build profits on parcels. (In Fahour's five years as chief executive, Australia Post's parcels revenue has tripled to more than $3 billion, partly because its national network of more than 4000 post offices gives it and its specialist parcels and logistics service, StarTrack, a big advantage over competitors like Toll and DHL.) He is proud that five-day-a-week letter deliveries are to be maintained, and that the latest round of job losses will involve no forced redundancies; staff in affected areas being given the option of transferring to other parts of the corporation. Still, some question the way Fahour is going about saving Australia Post. To Bill Healey, former chief executive of the Australian Printing Industries Association, it is bizarre that the head of the mail service spends so much time talking about the terminal decline of mail.

"It's like the head of McDonald's criticising beef burgers," says Healey, who also wonders about Fahour's strategy of introducing more expensive stamps and slower deliveries. Did a business ever improve its bottom line by offering a worse service at a higher price? Healey thinks not. "It becomes this vicious spiral." (There's no denying, though, that increasing use of email and other forms of digital communication has seen the volume of letters we send each year plunge 35 per cent since 2008.) Fahour took 78 people to the London Olympics in 2012. The cost of their airfares, hotel rooms, Olympics tickets and meals was $2.5 million. "That was absolutely scandalous," says Healey. "There is no justification for Australia Post to be engaged in that level of corporate hospitality." Questioned about the junket at a Senate committee hearing, Fahour "absolutely and categorically" confirmed that all the guests were important, or potentially important, Australia Post customers. Most were online retailers who used its parcels service, he said. Australia Post refuses to release the guest list, but one of those who received an invitation – and declined it – was Greg Hywood, chief executive of Fairfax Media (publisher of Good Weekend). Another on the list was Andrew Demetriou, then head of the AFL, who accepted (though paid for his own accommodation). D emetriou already had reason to be grateful to Fahour who, as Australian chief of NAB, had initiated AFL sponsorship by the bank that Demetriou estimates now totals about $100 million. Then Fahour had boosted Australia Post's sponsorship of the AFL, giving particularly generously to its multicultural program. Demetriou employed Fahour's younger brother, Ali, as the AFL's national multicultural manager, but says the job and the sponsorship were not connected. Demetriou and Fahour are close friends, even if Demetriou finds some of his behaviour "a little bit quirky".

For instance, Fahour is a slave to his phone, Demetriou says, and will interrupt any face-to-face conversation – "He could be talking to the prime minister" – to take a call or read a text message. "I say, 'Ahmed, throw that friggin' bloody mobile in the bin, mate.' " During Fahour's time at NAB, the bank hired another of his brothers, Moustafa, then 26, as general manager of its private and institutional wealth division. Moustafa is the founder of the Islamic Museum of Australia, in the Melbourne suburb of Thornbury. Another sibling, Samira El Khafir, a MasterChef finalist in 2013, manages the cafe attached to the museum. But it is Ahmed Fahour's portrait that dominates the art gallery. And why not? Without his financial support – in particular the gift of the Australia Post bonus – the museum would not exist. "If I didn't donate that," Fahour tells me, "it would never have got built." He contributes to other causes, too. "Ahmed has been a very generous philanthropist," says Louise Adler, summing him up as "a compassionate and humane individual". Martin O'Nea, the Communication Workers Union's former assistant national secretary, is not a fan. "Last time I was in a room with Ahmed Fahour, he was like a cross between a caged tiger and a petulant schoolboy," says O'Nea, who nevertheless detects a hint of bigotry in the degree of animosity he attracts, particularly online. "Some of the criticism seems to be because he is a Muslim." The need to succeed and bring everyone with him has dominated Fahour's life and shaped his personality. "I feel an enormous burden of responsibility," he says, admitting that in his mind, he is like the primordial Titan of Greek mythology who was condemned to bear the weight of the heavens on his shoulders. "I don't want to describe myself as Atlas, but that's how I feel."

He dates that sensation to the day of his father's accident. Watching Abdul, the family's main breadwinner, being taken away in an ambulance, the then 10-year-old decided it was up to him to look after his mother, sisters and brothers – he would take over in the time of crisis. Which is what Fahour believes he is doing in his present job. Now it's not just his parents and siblings but the whole country that is relying on him, he says. "Because this is a national treasure, Australia Post." On the phone one evening just before deadline, Fahour and I are talking about obligations, Maseratis, his mother, the museum: "Somebody said to me the other day that I seem a lot more content, or more mellow," he says. "More relaxed, and not in so much of a hurry. I said to them, 'I finally feel like I'm worthy.' " He thinks about it for a second. "I don't have to prove anything to anybody. I don't need to prove that I've done my best, because I have done my best. I can live with myself now, because I have not wasted a single opportunity that God has put in front of me."