Corporate titan Ron Brierley jailed for child abuse images
One of the most powerful businessmen in Australian and New Zealand history – Ron Brierley – has been sentenced for child abuse images.
Police & Courts
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There was a time when corporate titan Ron Brierley could have anything he wanted – now his knighthood, his power and his legacy have been washed away and his empire is just a prison cell.
Brierley, 84, was sentenced to 14 months prison after pleading guilty to possessing tens of thousands of child sex abuse images at the Downing Centre District Court on Thursday.
“Images of this kind are neither innocuous or benign,” Judge Sarah Huggett told the court, noting Brierley had collected images over years.
“For decades he had been an intelligent and high functioning businessman … his offending was not isolated nor aberrant nor something that was only in his later years.”
The Daily Telegraph understands Brierley’s legal team are already launching a challenge against the result in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal.
The court had been asked to give the elderly business giant a sentence to be served in the community – but the judge declined concluding it was “humane” to lock him up.
It took “Sir Ron” 80 years to amass his power and legacy – his deviance wiped it away in a second.
Brierley was a household name in the 1980s, his brash business style and eye for undervalued companies made him an instrumental figure in the decade that greed was good.
One in 20 Kiwis owned stock in his company, Brierley Investments, during this time and daring business coups earned him the title “corporate raider”.
“Few takeover plays in Australia during the 1980s were acted out without Brierley‘s presence,” The Financial Review wrote in 1994.
Brierley had just purchased the best building in Wellington, the newspaper said at the time, touting him as “a local boy done good” worth $85m.
His fortune often dwarfed the mining magnates and movie stars who appeared alongside him on the rich lists at the high water mark of corporate capitalism.
Born in 1937 in Wellington, New Zealand, Brierley had launched a horse racing tip sheet then a business stock newsletter by the time he was 19-years-old.
He founded his own investment firm in the 60s and moved to Sydney, listing Brierley Investments on the stock exchange.
Three years later it was a blue chip stock worth $10 billion.
He was chair of the Bank of New Zealand and hoped to take it over before the financial crisis of 1987 dealt him a body blow.
The crash made him a “zombie” he once told journalists, but he was far from finished.
Brierley was knighted for his services to business just one year later, in 1988.
The raider went global in the 90s – first when he took the helm of a holding company Guinness Peat Group where he remained until 2015.
High powered businessman Gary Weiss AM, another Wellington boy who had worked with Brierley, was appointed to GPG and helped grow it into a powerful figure in global investment.
Dr Weiss called Brierley a “principal mentor in business matters” in those days in a reference letter to the court.
He was one of many high profile people who championed Brierley’s generous and humble spirit – and now denounced his awful crimes.
The last two decades of Brierley’s life have been a legacy building campaign – he became a patron saint of cricket in New Zealand, a benefactor to many schools and an obsessive stamp collector.
His name graced his old Wellington College’s buildings and the town’s cricket ground sheltered spectators in Brierley Pavillion.
Bobbing around in Sydney Harbour on his yacht Brierley would look out at a world that had been good to him – and it appeared Sir Ron was being good to the world.
Then the secret came out – Australian Border Force officials stopped Brierley on his way to Fiji, rifled through his laptop and found images of scantily clad children just before Christmas 2019.
He told officers he thought the images were “perfectly okay” and had been “approved by various bodies”.
One of the 40,000-plus images was of a totally naked child on a bed posing for the camera – it had been sent to his GPG email account.
The rest were children in swimmers or underwear striking suggestive poses for the depraved pleasure of adults.
Most were girls aged around 11, but some were much younger and there were “many” victims in Brierley’s secret collection, the courts concluded.
Judge Huggett said the images were far from the worst category but they provided him with sexual gratification all the same.
Each image was of a real child, a real victim, the court heard.
Brierley’s name, in the two years since, has been “scrubbed” from the plaques and buildings of organisations that had been on the good end of his generous cheques.
“Public recognition was a terribly important part of his own life and his image of himself,” his barrister Tim Game SC told the court earlier this year.
“The downfall has been complete to the point donations are not accepted or returned if given.”
Brierley had begged to be spared prison with his legal team saying he was an elderly and unwell man.
A running theme through Brierley’s life, as it was charted in newspapers and stories from his friends, is that he was an idiosyncratic man, an enigma with an obsessive personality.
“Ron was not a man’s man interested in rugged activity – nor a ladies man,” one supporter told the court in a letter.
“(He) was something of an enigma.”
Brierley’s lawyers drew on his aloofness, his unusual quirks and told the court they were the signs of a man battling inner demons.
“He has kept this to himself and has been troubled by it for a long period of time,” his barrister said of his crimes against children.
Police called for Brierley to be locked up to send a message to others hiding similar depravities.
Brierley’s were not victimless crimes, they reminded the court.
Brierley, no longer “Sir Ron” hobbled out of his Point Piper mansion with a cane, slumped into an Audi and was hurried to the stuffy Downing Centre Court room on Thursday morning to learn his fate.
He sat impassive, behind a surgical mask, hunched in the courtroom as his sentence was announced.
One friend, barrister Thos Hodgson, wrote in a reference letter that Brierley would spend his twilight years in extreme distress and the subject of public ridicule – a “broken man”.
“All his kindness and generosity and good works will forever be overshadowed by those revelations concerning his possession of child abuse material,” the barrister said.
Judge Huggett noted he had many friends who found his crimes irreconcilable with the “Sir Ron” they knew.
“His fall from grace has been radical,” she said.
He will be eligible for parole in May 2022.
‘Shocked’: Brierley’s associates denounce his child abuse crimes
Ron Brierley made himself a star in the constellation of Australia’s business and political elite — now all but a few have abandoned him.
Here are some of the people who have denounced Brierley’s crimes but have given evidence as to his character in letters to the court.
Businessman and former politician Sir Robert Jones
Sir Robert Jones has known Brierley since their shared humble beginnings in New Zealand. Sir Jones said they began as pariahs in a conservative society and became friends.
They moved to Australia at about the same time.
Sir Jones told the court Brierley’s knighthood, his businesses and his titles were very important to Brierley.
“All of these things have vanished now, in extremely poor health, he has gone full circle to once again find himself a social pariah, his name being removed from school buildings he paid for and numerous other entities.”
Wran government minister and politician Rodney Cavalier AO
Rodney Cavalier focused on his time as Trustee of the Sydney Cricket Ground, a position he took on as Brierley left.
“The borders of the world of cricket are safeguarded by people like Ron… The generosity of Ron Brierley exposed me to a world of which I had an inkling, nought more.”
“Moves by some to shun Ron will hurt him deeply… I know enough of Ron to know he is suffering.”
Cricketer and NZ politician John Morrison MNZM
John Morrison said he knew Brierley since the 1960s and called him the “go-to man” in New Zealand Cricket.
“I was very shocked and saddened when I learned of Ron’s offending. I have found it very hard to reconcile with the man I have known for many years and who I have regarded as a very generous and honourable man.”
Former Cricket Australia chairman and solicitor Jack Clarke
Jack Clarke spoke of a three-decade friendship based on a love of cricket and South Australian shiraz.
Brierley, he recalled, is extremely generous with older retired cricketers, shelling out anonymously for hearing aids and plane tickets for reunions.
“He has told me he deeply regrets his actions, which have caused him great embarrassment, and he has sought professional help to ensure that this terrible affliction is cured.”
Barrister Thos Hodgson
Eminent lawyer Thos Hodgson has known Brierley since the 2000s and said they bonded over a shared love of cricket.
Mr Hodgson said Brierley’s crimes are “a complete aberration and totally out of character”.
“His world has now been shattered,” the barrister said.
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