Getting Rogered

BigCake has been on the receiving end of the Roger Award – well sort of.

This year’s winner, announced last night,  is ANZ bank which organisers Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) say won because of the ING funds fiasco was “pure greed capitalism” at its worst. ING NZ is a wholly owned subsidiary of the ANZ Group.

I was working at Tranz Rail at the time it got the award in 2000. They’d also won it back in 1997.

Managing Director Francis Small (sensibly) didn’t want a bar of a presentation from CAFCA, so as is usual in large organisations, the communications team was left to sort it out.

Can’t remember how we did this, but no one at Tranz Rail took the award particularly seriously.

They went on to win it again 2002.

Tranz Rail was an easy target – a hated trans-national corporation (TNC) with ownership including American rail road companies and Fay Richwhite.

But it was a mess they got themselves into.

BigCake’s impression from his time at Tranz Rail was that the consortium that bought the rail network in 1993 for $328 million got a lemon. They could never run it properly at a profit because large chunks of the network were unprofitable.

When they tried to close lines, they were knocked back by Government.

So the only way they could protect their investment was to not invest (or as CAFCA would say run down) the network, though that was hard because it was pretty bad to start with.

This is a round about way of saying who owns an asset is not the issue. It’s the rules around the way the owners behave that are important.

This is easier said than done as the NZ Herald points out regarding Telecom.

TNCs, or any other international investors, are okay as long as they put more back more into New Zealand than they take out and good Governments will make sure that happens.