Ken Wikeley

"Rainbow Corporation’s prospectus proposed the issue of 12.5 million shares. Of those, five million would be sold at 50c per share to the public, and the rest would be sold for 20c per share to the founders. Hawkins would be chairman and the five board members would be Heatley, who would also be managing director, John Sheffield, Peter Coote, Margaret George and Margaret Tapper. John Sorensen and Ken Wikeley would be principal shareholders. The prospectus records that the company had agreed to issue 625,000 options ‘to a company indirectly owned by the Managing Director Mr Craig Heatley’. The options were exercisable at 50c each at any time prior to July 1989."

"The leisure business was providing a healthy cashflow but Heatley was already looking farther afield. While one of the main reasons for floating had been to raise money to pay back high-interest borrowings, in the back of his mind he had hoped that if the park was successful it would embolden his colleagues to consider other investments. He and the other directors knew that the leisure industry had a natural cap in a city with a relatively small population. It was hard to see what more could be wrung out of Rainbow’s End. In July 1986 the leisure side of the business was split off as Questar Corporation, which planned to look offshore for further sporting/leisure and tourism opportunities. It was majority-owned by Rainbow but listed separately on the stock exchange. An ill-fated foray into commercial property, Rainbow Properties, which developed the Majestic Centre in downtown Wellington, was also spun off from Rainbow with Ken Wikeley as managing director."

"‘Rainbow would have completely crashed and gone like the others because it was a bubble company and the share price was totally in bubble territory and he’d paid big prices for all those stakes in the companies he had,’ Alan Gibbs says. ‘The clever thing he did was to sell out to Brierley before the crash so he must have had some presentiment of it. If he’d stayed five more minutes, he’d have been on his belly. He was lucky.’ Sir Bob Jones recalls Ken Wikeley saying to him, ‘You know, Craig has an almost animal intuition to know when to jump out of something.’"