Taking Stock 5 March 2026

JUST about every New Zealand investor of a certain age (call it 65 and over) is likely to have had an interest in the affairs of Brierley Investments and its founder Ron Brierley.

Brierley today is a stooped forgetful man in his late-80s, living in the fading memories of his high- profile days.

He has written a vanilla memoir, had 2000 copies printed, and has had the help of an ageing journalist who Brierley knew decades ago.

This item is not a recommendation to buy what is a grey, self-justifying account of a businessman whose public reputation has collapsed as a result of unimaginable flirtations with child pornography.

In summary the book is not worth reading, except by those who want affirmation that Brierley's oddities led to weaknesses, prime amongst which was his quite painful inability to employ people who might offset his weaknesses. The most obvious error he made was to forge a link with Bob Jones, hardly an example of a man who would lead Brierley into better decisions or to a more acceptable lifestyle.

Brierley's image was of one who bought asset-rich companies, applied corporate and strategic skills to add value, and then either held a much better, reformed company or sold it to an appropriate owner.

The image was rarely anywhere near the reality.

More likely Brierley bought under-valued assets from the acquired company, window-dressed the acquisition, then sold it to a "new company" that had not performed competent due diligence. Many of his acquisitions were based on land or property values.

He often built links with ratbags. For example, some of his team linked with Leadenhall Investments, a now defunct private superannuation fund manager, managed by the late Peter O'Neill, a yachtie, a golfer, a champagne drinker and a socialite, and by David Ross, a convicted fraudster. When Brierley planned a takeover, Leadenhall would be pleased to fill the individual Brierley peoples' funds with shares in the takeover target, the Leadenhall managers often filling their own accounts before the takeover was announced. This was in the days when NZ was seen as the wild west.

The target, say DB Breweries, would be selling at $4.70. The takeover price would be $5.70. Those in the know had access to huge personal profits. Fill your boots at $4.70, sell into the Brierley takeover offer at $5.70 a week or two later, and make untaxed capital gains, for all those who decided to harpoon the "goldfish in a bowl".

Not all Brierley cohorts participated. Many did. It was a rotten practice.

Leadenhall was a lousy accomplice. Eventually when its practices were uncovered, it collapsed, but the National Bank kindly bought it for a dollar meaning Leadenhall was quietly closed, rather than disgraced in the public eye.

Brierley himself had become a media darling, granted the status of genius by the media, knighted by the same Labour government that knighted Jones, and Brierley was appointed in 1987 chairman of the BNZ by that Labour government, given the inside running to prepare to buy the government-owned bank for Brierley.

Thankfully Labour's most tuned-in Cabinet member, David Caygill, presided over changes, leaving a truly independent financial market person, Frank Pearson, to chair the dysfunctional bank in 1989.

Brierley says in his book he regretted being sacked as chairman as he had a plan for the bank. My view is that this was a decision thoroughly justified.

Brierley's board of directors included Sky Casino chairman, Rob Campbell, whose background and subsequent careers seemed to me to be odd, for a bank director.

Ultimately the BNZ was sold to the National Bank of Australia, for a price less than half of what the NZ public had paid when it listed. The smart people, recognising the NAB had no sinister plans, sold BNZ and used the proceeds to buy NAB. As is now clear this was a good swap. NAB shares have grown to a value many times their value when it bought BNZ.

It is also worth recalling that in 2008, when the BNZ was again on its knees, NAB fronted with a billion-dollar input to ensure BNZ could meet its commitments. Sometimes having a big brother is a blessing.

Brierley eventually was deposed by the opportunists he had employed and went off to Australia pretending he still had some magic with which to entice retail investors. The company he founded failed, was flogged off to Asia, and is now out of sight, the memory of it an uncomfortable reminder of the awful practices of the 1980s.

Brierley himself, faded, was somehow identified as a porn collector, was charged, found guilty, briefly jailed, and now resembles a broken figure with some high degree of forgetfulness, aged 88.

The aura that had him as a media darling has long disappeared.

The truth is that he was socially gauche, a back-office character, he was able to recognise that if $2 notes were selling for $1 that an easy profit might be made, but was no Warren Buffett.

He was not any sort of a genius, had very poor judgement of people, was inept at executing operational improvements in the companies he bought, and was by nature an analyst, an opportunist, a trader, but very rarely a strategic thinker who would foresee changes, or opportunities to add value with skilled management.

Most definitely Brierley's company was not even remotely similar to a really skilled investment company like Infratil.

The late Lloyd Morrison had created Infratil in 1994, about the time Brierleys was disintegrating.

Morrison was a long-term strategic thinker who succeeded in attracting skilled people and made money by developing the companies he bought. Infratil sought to read cyclical and structural change, an obvious example being changes in thinking on renewable energy, and in more recent times, the growth in value of data security and data centres. He had occasional misfires, but his wins have been huge.

Infratil was to Brierley Investments what Mainfreight is to Move.

Brierley's (final) book is grey, self-focussed, but neither particularly transparent about the company's decision-making processes, or the effect of in-fighting between high-ego executives, nor does it offer in-depth insight into a career that had been leveraged off a mystique built by the media, particularly INL (now morphed into Stuff).

It might have been kinder to restrict circulation of the new book to a few old cronies and his family.

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THE scourge of modern times, scamming and hacking, seems to be a threat to investors and businesses that invades everyday life.

Scammers usually exploit the gullible, establishing their credentials with phoney stories.

We will all recall the Nigerian oil princes who wanted to give us millions, the Spanish raffle we had won (without ever buying a ticket), the romantic correspondent who needed money to ward off a criminal cartel, or the friend who had been falsely jailed and needed bail money.

The vulnerable and the gullible, those who do not have the experience to validate these stories, and the lonely, may continue to be victims.

Hacking is a much harder crime to avoid. Security systems and hard-to-remember passwords can offer a defence but as we know literally hundreds of NZ businesses are hacked every year, the latest being businesses that hold our medical records.

Exploitation of the gullible is not new. An early example came in the 1950s.

My mention of Jones in the previous item will prompt many to recall the 1950s-early 60s pro-forma invoice scandal that enabled Jones, as a teenager, to relieve British companies of hundreds of thousands of pounds and set himself up to become a property mogul.

The late Jones, with the late Laurie Miller (an NZ test cricketer - briefly) and two Lower Hutt characters went to London in the late 1950s to exploit the quite stupid business systems in the city. They invoiced British insurance companies, businesses and banks for advertising that had never been ordered.

The UK systems then had one group of people ordering advertising and some uninquisitive clerks paying bills. Pro-forma invoices were rarely if ever matched with proof of an order by the sales department. The invoices were just paid - money for nothing.

So the Kiwi lads collected hundreds of thousands of pounds by typing invoices on an old typewriter and mailing out the bills. When eventually someone disputed an invoice and reported it to police, Interpol arrived to capture the lads. The typewriter was despatched into the Thames, off a London bridge, the disposal unwisely photographed. The old photo was later displayed to friends as a souvenir of an "adventure" that saw the young men return to NZ with what was then an immense fortune equivalent to at least 100 times the average salary in New Zealand, in each of their pockets. I doubt the four young men visited Britain in the immediate years after their raid.

Of course Jones returned, invested in an option to buy a large Lower Hutt property, leveraging his pocketful, soon after sold the option for a large multiple of cost, and within a decade had a portfolio of cheap properties, often working with his friend Pat Rippon to buy student flats.

Scamming and hacking clearly is not a 21st century development.

Today, most businesses that are hacked are penetrated because of silly passwords or human error / gullibility, perhaps someone responding to a fake "IRD" demand to disclose passwords etc.

Most businesses pay the $50,000 or $100,000 “ransom tax” to the successful hacker, not much different in outcome to what the Brits did in London nearly 70 years ago.

Will we one day develop a portal to our data that requires unalterable personal features - DNA, eyeball recognition, fingerprints, whatever - that removes the threat of invasion?

In my lifetime? Or will Arthur Dailey characters always find a backdoor to enter?

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NOT often am I presented with an opportunity to praise our newspaper groups, so it is nice to record the recent news that both the NZ Herald and the Stuff group are learning to decline advertisements that mislead the public.

When the self-acclaimed financial guru Bernie Whimp sought to advertise his plans to deliver double-digit returns to investors, the NZ Herald, Stuff and The National Business Review declined to run the advertisements.

Allied Press, which runs the Otago Daily Times and some community newspapers, chose to take the promised revenue and allowed some vulnerable members of the public to be attracted to Whimp's offerings.

Now that the Financial Markets Authority has ensured the Whimp funds are closed, pending possible liquidation that Whimp says will wipe out about a third of investors' money, the ODT and Allied Press will be in the spotlight, quite deservedly.

What liability is there for newspapers to be accountable for advertisements a media group chooses to publish. Any? Or plenty? Do I sense a class action might give us a clue?

Whatever the answer to that question Allied Press has shown shocking judgement, leading to at least some people losing their capital in ventures that were, at best, unorthodox and not backed by capital.

It is rare but fair that we acknowledge those who, in contrast, declined the revenue, just as it is fair that we spotlight the Otago Daily Times and its sister community papers, which clearly need new leadership.

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Travel

9 March - Whanganui - David Colman

10 March - New Plymouth - David Colman

11 March - Palmerston North - David Colman

12 March – Nelson – Edward Lee

13 March – Lower Hutt – Fraser Hunter

Chris Lee & Partners Ltd