1961: Brierley Investments Ltd

April 5, 2021

By AHNZ

Ron Brierley (83yo) is one of New Zealand’s most accomplished businessmen. In the process of bettering his country he was rewarded by it with a fortune. What’s the End Game for the great old money whale as the sharks start to circle? Everybody gets old, what becomes of their fortune?

Great Estates in the 1890s were hunted to extinction, nationalised by the government and broken up. Charitable bequests such as the Lees Institute, Mcleans Mansion, and Waitangi Treaty Grounds have also been seized, the wishes of the givers twisted over their dead bodies. Logan Campbell’s Cornwall Park has been a stand-out in somehow resisting the scavengers thus far.

“Ron Brierley, born in 1937, established his investment firm Brierley Investments Ltd (BIL) in 1961. He invested in companies with low share prices and valuable assets. His style of corporate raiding was not always welcomed by…” – Te Ara.govt.

“What Ron Brieley could see was that the New Zealand business world in the mid 50s was so conservative, so complacent, so much an old boys network that most businessmen didn’t actually understand the true value of what they owned. For Ron Brierley it was going to be easy to buy these businesses at their discount prices and then simply sell them off bit by bit.” [ie, companies worth more dead than alive]- Ref. The Boy from Island Bay (2008 docco, 13mins)

“…as Akela grew older and feebler the lame tiger had come to be great friends with the younger wolves of the Pack, who followed him for scraps, a thing Akela would never have allowed if he had dared to push his authority to the proper bounds. Then Shere Khan would flatter them and wonder that such fine young hunters were content to be led by a dying wolf…Akela is very old, and soon the day comes when he cannot kill his buck, and then he will be leader no more…It is in my heart that when Akela misses his next kill—and at each hunt it costs him more to pin the buck—the Pack will turn against him and against thee.” – Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling

Brierley and his legacy is currently in the process of being cancelled without mercy, like Kipling’s ageing wolf Akela. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says she has started the process of stripping his knighthood. Decades of work by one of the Silent Generation will be harvested for parts by the Millennials who live in the world he built.

“There will never be another BIL because we now have a Takeovers Code and we don’t have a large number of companies with under utilised and undervalued assets…Brierley Investments will be missed but its operating style was far more suited to the 1970s and early 1980s than the 21st century.”- Brian Gaynor (2014)¹

“Within hours of Sir Ron Brierley pleading guilty to possessing child sexual abuse material, the Prime Minister had begun the process of stripping him of his knighthood.”- Newshub (April 2021)

Occam’s Razor suggests being rich and aging is enough of a cause to topple Brierley and disseminate his wealth and power. Or, there’s the mainstream narrative which may be true but sounds much less plausible: In 2019 a unit of Australian Police singled out Brierley at the airport and searched his personal electronic media, finding incriminating material. Arrest. And off to court he went.

The laptop and storage devices of a multi-billionaire with international corporate confidences to protect and elaborate accounts information at his fingertips was easily accessed by police. Despite the great need and limitless financial ability to have the most encrypted data in the world, Brierley’s was allegedly an open book to the IT CSI of Bondi Beach boffins! Instead of the ‘unprotected’ spreadsheets or bank account numbers or personnel information the police looked past any of that to his pictures collection, they say. And what they found was criminal.

Yeah, right, maybe. I don’t know. And, not knowing, it’s story time. And I prefer Kipling’s storytelling to the Bondi Beach Police. Brierley made a career of taking down bloated and decrepit old wolves himself in a fair fight. The Larry the Liquidator of New Zealand. If defeated, it will not be by the Law of the Jungle. Akela never had to fight an enemy like this!

—
1 R.A. Brierley Investments Ltd  incorporated on March 30, 1961; Ref. Brierley Investments delisting end of an era, Brian Gaynor (2014); Milford

Image ref. The Boy from Island Bay (2008,) Front Page; NZ Sound Archive; NZ on Screen

Image ref. Larry the Liquidator, hero of the film Other People’s Money (1991)

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