Straight-shooting corporate raider
Tony Gibbs always won more than he lost. A necessary trait to succeed in business.
A canny investor, a tough negotiator, strategic thinker and handson realist, Gibbs, a seasoned company director, was known as a can-do man, someone who got the job done.
A veritable Mr Fix-It, he played a leading role at Sir Ron Brierley’s investment company Guinness Peat Group (GPG), which was involved in many takeovers over the 1990s and 2000s.
Gibbs never objected to being described as the country’s No 1 corporate raider.
In fact, there were plenty of companies that benefited from what he called the Guinness Peat Group touch, he maintained.
GPG was no ordinary investor, Gibbs remarked in the 1990s. ‘‘We’re aggressive and we make no apologies for that . . . You can love us or hate us, it depends when you last encountered us . . .’’
Indeed, Gibbs’ name became synonymous with high-profile corporate takeover brawls, from Enza to Tower to BNZ Finance.
Born in Romford, east of London, Gibbs and his parents moved to New Zealand when he was a toddler. He grew up in west Auckland but never settled.
He left school before he sat School Certificate. ‘‘I didn’t like school,’’ he once remarked. ‘‘I didn’t really concentrate at school. I just didn’t want to be there. I was immensely unhappy.
‘‘I felt I wanted to be in the world. I left school basically the day I turned 15 and was legally allowed to.
‘‘I have occasionally met people who’ve got double MBAs or something, who say: ‘Ooh you’ve done very well considering your lack of education.’ Well, you see, I dispute all of that. I reckon I’ve got a superb education. It just wasn’t learnt at school,’’ he said in one interview.
At 15 he boarded a meat boat and worked his way back to Europe on what would be a six-year OE.
His adventures during the late 60s included travelling around the Arctic Circle, peeling potatoes on ships, riding a horse for a living in Israel, chipping bricks in Denmark, living in a bombedout castle in Germany and working in a private zoo in Florence.
When he returned to New Zealand in 1971 it was with his wife, Val, who was pregnant with the first of their two children.
He started an importing business, selling sporting goods and electronics.
In the late 70s he sold up and, with the capital, began investing in the sharemarket, teaching himself and making himself known to brokers, many of whom remained his friends for life.
This work led him to Brierley Investments, where he became a senior figure in the 1980s.
The 80s were heady years at Brierleys, Gibbs recalled in a 2003 interview.
‘‘We all thought we could walk on water. There were six of us in the operations team looking after 30 companies. We were making money and the shares only went one way – up.’’
Black Monday changed all that. Gibbs lost a lot in the stock market crash on October 19, 1987, but he was only down, not out.
‘‘I didn’t go broke but I lost a lot of money. I grew up in high inflationary times – if you bought property it always went up, the fact that property could come down was unheard of,’’ he said at the time.
An out-of- the-blue call from former Brierleys boss Sir Ron Brierley led to a job with Guinness Peat Group (GPG) in 1993. Gibbs became his man in Auckland.
Their philosophy was to buy undervalued assets and work those assets harder to extract value. He and Brierley were among the first pioneers in New Zealand to identify companies that had assets they weren’t using, or were inefficiently employed, or businesses that weren’t being run with enough discipline. GPG would buy them and restructure them.
Gibbs once said he always found his feet in organisations such as Brierleys and GPG, ‘‘because they know they can count on me’’.
‘‘They would say: ‘Give Tony a difficult, knotty problem.’ That’s what they always say. And it would be: ‘Go away and fix that.’ No-one told me how. I just went away and did it. I sort of sniff my way through life,’’ he said in a 2009 interview with Stuff.
He was Brierley’s lieutenant in New Zealand until a falling out at GPG when Brierley sacked him from the board in 2010 after Gibbs released a statement to the NZ Stock Exchange publicly opposing the company’s plans to spin off its Australian business.
He was director of many companies including Enza, Fletcher Forests and GPG. He was chairman of Tower and Turners & Growers, the latter of which he took from having shareholder funds of $40 million to more than $300m.
Gibbs, one of the wealthiest people in New Zealand, has been described variously by those in his orbit as highly litigious, a ‘‘four seasons in one day kind of guy who blows hot and cold’’. But most agree he was always determined to win.
‘‘There are only winners and losers as far as Tony is concerned. You don’t have draws,’’ said one acquaintance.
But Gibbs maintained he was simply dead straight.
New Zealand Howard League penal reform charity chief executive Mike Williams agrees.
As founding patron and president of the league, Gibbs worked with Williams on literacy and drivers’ licensing programmes for prisoners.
Gibbs was ‘‘straight as a die’’, says Williams. ‘‘He was a wise guide, a man of principle and a great mentor.’’
But nevertheless, he was never far from some skirmish or other. He once admitted to a journalist that he liked ‘‘having a good scrap’’, but he was said to have had the ability to get on with those he had gone up against once the scrap was over.
The corporate dogfights he was involved in over the years were many. There were acrimonious battles for both Enza in 2000 and, three years later, for Tower. He also fought for kiwifruit exporter Zespri to lose its monopoly.
In 2006, on behalf of GPG shareholders, there was that famous joust with Michael Cullen and the Labour government of the day over its plan to change tax rules on foreign investments. The rules would have seen shareholders of Londonheadquartered GPG taxed on unrealised gains.
Gibbs won.
There was the stoush with New York hedge fund Perry Corporation in 2002 over its stake in Fletcher Challenge offshoot Rubicon. Gibbs lost.
He always said business was more than just knowing the numbers. ‘‘You either have a gut feel about a company or you don’t,’’ he said in one interview.
In another, he put it this way: ‘‘I may not be an accountant but I usually know where the money is.’’
Commonsense, he remarked, one piece of it piled on the next piece, is what makes a good business person. You don’t have to be Einstein, you just have to follow your instincts.
In the late 1980s, Gibbs and his wife
‘‘There are only winners and losers as far as Tony is concerned. You don’t have draws.’’
bought a 56-hectare mandarin plantation at Matakana, north of Warkworth. They called the 55,000-tree orchard Aeneid after Virgil’s epic poem about the founding of Rome.
He went on to establish a huge avocado orchard.
Gibbs, who was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business in 2009, suffered health problems over the years, exacerbated by relentless hard work and frequent business trips around the globe.
In 2003 he was diagnosed with a rare and potentially fatal condition affecting the arteries called polyarteritis nodosa.
This year he was diagnosed with stage four cancer and died eight weeks later. He worked right up to the bell. Gibbs, who is survived by his wife and their two children, Charlotte and Ant, was never one to complain, and he approached the last weeks of his life in exactly that fashion, where he got on and got things done, says close friend Andrew Barclay.
‘‘He didn’t stop for a moment to commiserate or spend time on negative feelings – he was a positive feelings kind of guy.’’ – By Bess Manson
Sources: The Dominion Post/Stuff (David Hargreaves, Melanie Carroll), Andrew Barclay, Mike Williams, Jenni McManus, Sunday Star-Times (Liam Dann) Unlimited (Andrea Fox).