Sir Ron Brierley a corporate raider on police radar following arrest on child pornography charges
Early yesterday, an avalanche of texts began crisscrossing the world, all with the same shocking message.
In the early hours of Wednesday an avalanche of phone calls and text messages began crisscrossing Sydney, then Melbourne, New Zealand and likely London, lighting up the mobile phones of the country’s most powerful corporate executives with the same shocking message: “Have you heard the news about Ron Brierley?”
The day before, at 6.30am, Australian Border Force officers stopped an elderly man getting on a flight to Fiji from Sydney International Airport and allegedly found a laptop in his carry-on luggage crammed with child pornography.
To the average onlooker at the airport, or officers at the nearby Mascot Police Station where he was charged with six counts of possessing child abuse material, he was perhaps just another suspect.
But to the Australian, New Zealand and British business communities he was a ruthless, pioneering corporate raider and a hero to small shareholders.
Many called him friend, many had him around their offices or homes for drinks, a barbecue or dinner, catching up at office towers in Sydney or at lush holiday getaways around the world.
They fought corporate battles with him and enjoyed the spoils of their long and often brutal corporate campaigns for control or dominance of some of Australia’s best-known companies, including Woolworths, Coles, AGL, David Jones, the collapsed Adelaide Steamship of the 1980s and Air New Zealand, as well as a string of smaller companies across a wide galaxy of sectors such as property development, lotteries, hotels, IT, mining, dairy and farming.
Sir Ron Brierley officially announced his retirement in June, stepping down from his latest corporate vehicle, Mercantile Investment Company. The congratulations and testimonials came flooding in, with retail billionaire Solomon Lew’s among the most glittering.
Lew, ranked as Australia’s 34th richest person, with a personal fortune of more than $2bn, told The Australian at the time that Brierley was “the original raider and, in my opinion, he’s also still the best”.
The pair had a long and highly rewarding business association when Brierley was chairman of Lew’s company, Premier Investments, and helped Premier sell its 5.9 per cent of Coles to Wesfarmers for $1.1bn in 2007, triggering the ultimate dismemberment of the old Coles Myer conglomerate.
“For many years, the mere mention of his name struck fear into the hearts of lazy company board directors,” Lew told The Australian in June.
“I hold him in the highest regard, not only for his huge success but also for the manner in which he achieved it.
“Ron is a man of integrity, and his word is his bond. He consistently delivered great outcomes on his investments where some others had a hit-and-miss approach.”
Gary Weiss, a fellow Kiwi and long-time lieutenant who fought countless takeover battles with Brierley before forming his own corporate raiding vehicle, told The Australian in June that Australia now had a “much greater acceptance of shareholder activism” because of Brierley.
“We were very significant contributors to Australian jurisprudence and to the way takeovers are regulated,” Weiss said.
Brierley was still wheeling and dealing on the sharemarket this week, dumping a large number of shares in a West Australian diamonds explorer on Monday after failing to take over the firm since March 2015.
Brierley, knighted by the New Zealand governor-general in 1988 for services to business management and the community, collected over his 60 years in business and investment activities a contact book as thick as a phone directory. His friends, associates, allies and investors span the key commercial hubs in Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington and London.
In 2011 many of those colleagues gathered for a special reunion party to celebrate 50 years since Brierley had registered his first company. The calibre and power of the hundreds of business people and investors who met to toast the man who spawned generations of corporate raiders spoke volumes about his standing.
An investor since his youth when he fell in love with stamp collecting and tipping shares, he met the Queen on several occasions and is well known among some circles in Washington. In his former office in a prestigious tower at Sydney’s Circular Quay sat a framed picture of him with former US president Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan.
Hero to shareholders
A calculating corporate raider since the 1970s, he crafted the strategy of charging in to spluttering companies held down by lazy or incompetent management, seizing control and then resuscitating the business to carve it off and sell for a massive profit. He became a hero to small shareholders whose moribund companies were brought to life by Brierley and his lieutenants. Tens of thousands of investors across New Zealand, Australia and Britain followed his exploits and invested where he invested. At one point his investment and raiding vehicle, Brierley Investments, was the biggest company in New Zealand, the land of his birth, and Brierley was sought after for advice, stock picks and his view on the sharemarket.
But his passion for business and stock picking was matched, if not eclipsed, by his love of Test cricket. A former trustee of the Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground Trust, he rubbed shoulders with famous Australian and international cricketers. Through the sponsorship of his former company, Guinness Peat Group, of the annual Prime Minister’s XI cricket match at Manuka Oval in Canberra, he came into close contact with visiting overseas dignitaries, politicians and a string of prime ministers.
Brierley, a multi-millionaire, would happily fly out to watch cricket matches in Adelaide or Perth and was a frequent visitor at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. He was obsessed with The Invincibles, the all-conquering Australian team led by Don Bradman that toured Britain in 1948. He described them as “his heroes”. Brierley even helped Invincible Neil Harvey celebrate a birthday.
He has a reputation for being tight with money but was always happy to spend on cricket, and only in April this year the SCG announced the first Sir Ron Brierley Scholarship to Sydney Cricket Club first grade player Hugh Sherriff.
His other hobbies include collecting stamps and reading stodgy company annual reports. He would often be seen at business events or walking around the Sydney CBD in shorts when the standard uniform was a suit and tie. When most were enjoying drinks at the bar or sailing around Sydney Harbour, Brierley was more happy flicking through lengthy and complex accounts printed in an annual report.
He built his business reputation on a canny and potent mix of intense focus, stubbornness and determination.
Always confident
Brierley took his first step into investing in the 1960s, when he sent out stock-tipping newsletters to subscribers for a £2 subscription. He described this to his biographer Yvonne van Dongen as “a successful activity but not a popular one”.
In 1961 he moved to proper investing through a unified company vehicle and founded RA Brierley Investments, which by 1984 was the largest company in the New Zealand market by capitalisation.
In the 1980s Brierley’s Australian investment offshoot, Industrial Equity Limited, caused panic among managers and directors as it launched raids, busted up companies and swallowed others.
In 1983 IEL made one of the first major takeovers of the decade, bidding for brewer Carlton & United Breweries, which was at the heart of the Melbourne business establishment. It showed just how gutsy Brierley and his team could be in tackling companies many believed were too powerful to ever be subject to a raider’s grab.
Two years later Brierley moved on one of Australia’s oldest companies, AGL, secretly accumulating a 41.5 per cent stake in the giant energy business.
His investment firm bought supermarket giant Woolworths for $900m in the 80s. The retailer is now worth almost $48bn.
The sharemarket crash of 1987 took its toll on his investments as share prices collapsed. But Brierley was always confident, some might say overconfident, in his abilities. He once told the business journalist Barrie Dunstan for the 2008 book Investment Legends: “I’ve never doubted, I never thought perhaps I’m on the wrong path.”
By the late 80s he left behind his investment vehicles and it wasn’t until the 90s that he chaired Guinness Peat Group, which once again hunted down companies and created new ones.
The return to GPG and full-time corporate raiding gave him an avenue for his passions and his intellect. He highlighted his need to stay intellectually active when interviewed for Dunstan’s book.
“Retirement? What does that mean?’’ he was quoted as saying.
“There’s only the one true retirement — that’s when they carry you out. You definitely have to remain intellectually active and I think I have some responsibility (to do that) in terms of my corporate background and experience. I think someone who switches off intellectually, they’re on the way out.’’
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