‘Trailblazer’ business icon Gibbs dies
Tony Gibbs, a key player in many New Zealand boardrooms in the 1980s and 1990s, has died at the age of 72 after a period of ill health.
Gibbs – born in Essex, England, raised in Auckland – was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2009 for services to business.
He was corporate raider Sir Ron Brierley’s long-time lieutenant in
New Zealand until a public falling out at investment company Guinness
Peat Group. He was the director of many companies including ENZA, Fletcher Forests, GPG, and was chairman of Turners & Growers (T&G), and became one of the wealthiest people in New Zealand.
Andrew Barclay, managing director and CEO of Goldman Sachs NZ, was Gibbs’ personal investment banker for 30 years and became a close friend. ‘‘I’ve calculated that through that period we must have worked on 30 deals together – there was hardly a day in that period when I wouldn’t have spoken to Tony with respect to some deal we were working on or some possible deal we might have been looking at.’’
He described Gibbs as an incredibly generous person, kind, polite, and fair. When it came to business, he was single-minded and aggressive about achieving his goals, for shareholders and where he wanted to get to, Barclay said.
‘‘He was a terrific family man – his family and his grandchildren were immensely important to him, but commerce in New Zealand, the economy was at the heart of everything he did.’’
Gibbs had been a trailblazer. ‘‘In a sense, he and Ron Brierley were among the first pioneers in New Zealand to really go out and identify companies that had assets that they weren’t using, assets that were inefficiently employed, or businesses that just weren’t being run with enough discipline, and actually go and buy those businesses and restructure them.’’
Gibbs also became a patron of the Howard League for Penal Reform. ‘‘He turned it into something far more mainstream which was broadly rehabilitating prisoners – that was literacy, it was numeracy, it was drivers’ licences. Some of the programmes rolled out under his patronage were just incredible,’’ Barclay said.
Gibbs, who had managed a heart condition for years, was diagnosed with stage four cancer about eight weeks ago, he said. ‘‘He worked right up to the bell ... He had things to do, things he wanted to achieve on the massive avocado plantation which he’d built – there were reports to read, bills to pay, instructions to leave, and he worked through all of that.’’