Monday, September 05, 2005



They did what?

Transpower kept its dodgy $732.7 million overseas loan deal secret from shareholding Ministers, in violation of its own guidelines.

This is what happens when you corporatise - the executives forget who they are working for, and you lose accountability. Hopefully sacking those responsible will send the right message: that these people are supposed to be running our electricity system for the benefit of the New Zealand public - not so they can play financial games with other people's money.

11 comments:

The Alliance is of course the only party with a policy of reversing corporatisation.

Posted by Commie Mutant Traitor : 9/05/2005 11:29:00 AM

Happened on Aunty Helen's watch ol' buddy. Labour put mechanisms in place to monitor state corporates - what hapenned? Poor governance is what happened. Who's responsible? Guess.

wiremu1306.

Posted by Anonymous : 9/05/2005 12:30:00 PM

Well I'm not a partisan - genuinely haven't decided who to vote for ($5k tax back is awefully tempting but then again I'm fiscally conservative enough to think we should be paying back the deficit in the good years so we can borrow some in the bad) - but I think this is how this sort of thing should be handled:

- govt passes law/regulation to stop this sort of corruption (good!)
- corporation gets caught flouting said law (bad!)
- govt follows through and consequences ensue (good!)

So far we've seen the first two (one 'good!' for the govt, one 'bad!' for the corporation. The test for the govt would have been if they hadn't done the first step (they did) or didn't follow thru with the last one (we don't know yet). I don't think you can blame them (yet) for as far as I can see doing the right thing

After all the alternative is to have the govt micromanage the corporation and watch it's each and every move - and if that's the case it might as well be a govt department

Posted by Anonymous : 9/05/2005 01:05:00 PM

Governance. Monitoring. CCMAU. Your answer is right there. Nothing to do with micro-management.

wiremu1306

Posted by Anonymous : 9/05/2005 01:12:00 PM

Wiremu: Absolutely. But in cases like this, where there has been outright deceit from a board, all a shareholding minister can do is stick heads on pikes. Failure to do that would be a mark of lax management - not failure to notice when a bunch of managers tries very hard to hide what they are doing.

Posted by Idiot/Savant : 9/05/2005 03:04:00 PM

Did the taxpayer lose money. I thought basically the revenue (us) lost $A, the USA revenue lost $B (like we care) and the corporation (wholly owned by the taxpayer) made $A+$B.

So net-net, we win out, which I wouldn't call corruption.

Posted by Rich : 9/05/2005 03:15:00 PM

I think that part of the problem with this deal is that it's a bet (on lots of things, exchange rates, whether or not it will get paid back) not a sure thing - that means there's a risk associated with it and a possibility the company (which means us as the owners) will lose out on it - it's a big amount of money so we could potentially lose big. In any company those sorts of decisions are exactly the sorts of things that boards of directors are supposed to be involved in, and in this case apparently weren't.

If I were on that board I'd be firing someone's ass about now

Posted by Anonymous : 9/05/2005 03:29:00 PM

(I'm the anonymous from above)

Yeah tell me about it - I've lived in the US for the past 20 years and just moved back to NZ - taxes here (both as an employer and as an employee) are so much easier to deal with (so easy that for a while I was convinced there must be a catch and I was missing something). Lower here than the US too which is great - I was amazed there's no simple income splitting here though.

The US tax system has so many loopholes it's not funny - it's honestly not possible to know if you've filed your taxes correctly, mine was often 50 pages long (and I'm not that special) - it also means one can file a phony or suspect return and they wont come and get you for years (the IRS has 7 years to start to come after you) - many 'tax avoidance schemes' like this get ruled illegal years and years later - then you have to pony up along with penalties and interest

Posted by Anonymous : 9/05/2005 04:57:00 PM

(and I should add they were still playing the foreign exchange markets if they were moving money out and back in again - 'making a bet' there if you will)

Posted by Anonymous : 9/05/2005 04:58:00 PM

Tax should be simple and have HUGE penalties for evading it.

Posted by Genius : 9/05/2005 06:19:00 PM

i'm still waiting for the labour govt to apologise to sue newberry

Posted by Anonymous : 9/06/2005 12:54:00 AM