Pettigrew

"In this bleak environment, Gibbs did his duty for several years, devoting a couple of days a month to the Freightways board. Davis retired in 1981, leaving Gibbs as a full director. Pettigrew stepped down as managing director in 1983, being replaced by Trevor Farmer, although he remained very powerful as deputy chairman, with a small but not insignificant personal stake in the business. He was also on the board of New Zealand Forest Products. Freightways suffered from the fashion for excessive diversification that afflicted most large New Zealand companies of the era. Under Pettigrew it had bought a tinned fruit company in the Hawke’s Bay. Pettigrew had also wanted to buy a joinery company, but Gibbs fought against the idea, arguing that companies have a limited range of talents and that trying to do everything wouldn’t work for long."

"I wasn’t interested in currying anyone’s favour or in going along and asking formulaic questions, which is what I felt the other directors tended to do; I was interested in doing a good job for Mayne Nickless and so naturally I asked executives to explain themselves and account for things. I stood up to them and formulated an alternative view. None of this they enjoyed. I remember having discussions with them early on over the pricing of our loans. Having run a merchant bank for three years and helped pioneer the bill market in New Zealand, I knew a bit about it. But I felt Pettigrew was insulting: ‘What do you know about bill rates and finance?’ he sneered. None of the others said a word; they just sat back and let Pettigrew beat up on me. Initially, I thought these guys were unpleasant, but eventually I realised they were positively out to beat me up."

"*The board were like stunned mullets. They couldn’t work out how these guys had paid cash for half the company with no visible means of support and had bought out the main shareholders. They couldn’t see the value that we’d seen; they hadn’t thought the company was cheap. All they could say was, ‘What will you do about the other shareholders?’ My game here was to say, ‘Well, sorry we don’t have enough money to buy the others, it was a huge deal scrambling to borrow $55 million to buy half the company.’ ‘Isn’t there something you could do?’ Pettigrew asked. ‘Goodness me,’ I said, ‘that’s a big ask.’ Until then they’d treated me like scum, especially Pettigrew.* *This was quite fun. The truth of it was that anyone who knew anything would have known that we needed to get the rest. It was a perfect case for someone like Brierleys to step in and get the 10 per cent needed to frustrate us. We were terribly vulnerable and might have lost much of our profit. I said, ‘OK, I’ll try to persuade the banks to give us the rest, but only if you, the board, recommend to shareholders to sell at the 25 per cent premium.’ They said, ‘Hell yes, do you think you might? That would be fantastic.’ If the other directors had said we were not paying a fair price, we were stuffed. But all those top directors thought our price a generous one.*"