Sorry if I appear to be a conspiracy theorist, but I couldn’t resist commenting on the first post.
In particular Sir Peter Abeles’ penchant for visiting Air Shows and ordering aircraft without consulting the board resulting in the expensive mismatched fleet in the later years.
And who, I wonder, pocketed the multi million dollar commissions on each and every one of these many ‘silly’ purchases?
…it was stumbling towards its inevitable crisis when Air New Zealand without due diligence bought it for far more than it was really worth.
And who, pray tell, did ANZ buy the dead debt-ridden, dead-in-the-water airline from ‘without due diligence’? None other than the Dirty Digger himself, whose empire pocketed the many more dollars than AN was worth, leaving ANZ holding the proverbial baby. It will be interesting to follow the future careers of every person on the ANZ board, particularly any who find a plum job with any corporation even remotely associated with one with the word ‘news’ in its title.
The TESNA bid with all the intrigue by Fox and Lew is outlined at length but unfortunately never reaches a conclusion as to why they baulked at the final hurdle.
How many words does it take to say “When the out and out gift of the Sydney Terminal to TESNA was taken out of TESNA’s AN ‘rescue’ deal by Minister Anderson, Blind Freddie could have told you that the TESNA deal was never going to go forward.”
Were they only after the non airline assets, in particular the terminals, potentially worth more than the airline itself but realised late in the day they were not tradable items on their own…
Believe it or not, I hadn’t read this last paragraph when I wrote my last comment.
In a word – yes.
Not meaning in any way to disparage Lindsay Fox and Solomon Lew with my last comments – if anything, quite the opposite. If one could set aside the high emotions that were prevalent at the time, from a pure businessman’s point of view, (and that’s what the two gentlemen in question undoubtedly are), the airline was never anything more than a necessary evil that had to be taken on
temporarily to allow them to gain the real prize – the Sydney terminal. I suspect that ‘circumstances would have changed’ rather rapidly after they had the terminal safely transferred to a separate business entity and, with deep regret on the part of Lindsay and Solomon, AN Mark 2 would have gone the way of AN Mark 1. (On the subject of ‘Mark 1’ and ‘Mark 2’, is it just me, or do others feels there were (are?) just too many ‘Marks’ involved in the whole AN fiasco?)