Steve Walker

"Alongside Gibbs and Richwhite, two Fay, Richwhite men, Rob Cameron, a former senior Treasury official, and Steve Walker (‘Wakka’), a young thruster, rounded off the core of the team. For a while they called themselves the ‘Steam Team’, after a local brew in San Francisco (Anchor Steam) which they’d drunk in large quantities on American visits. In May 1989, a few months into their quest for Telecom, Gibbs was stunned to learn that Michael Fay had successfully obtained a 30 per cent stake in the Bank of New Zealand for Capital Markets, a public company Fay, Richwhite controlled. Richwhite remembers Gibbs yelling, ‘Why the hell did you want to buy a bloody bank?’ ‘He rang up a few hours later to apologise and said it was an amazing deal, well done; but Gibbsie’s first reaction was right.’ It emerged that the BNZ was laden with bad debts, mostly in Australia, making the investment a sour one."

"Gibbs presents an interesting paradox in the sense that his personality is intensely restless and rarely satisfied, driving a ceaseless search for new forms of stimulation, but so far as his money is concerned he has long since been satisfied and his search for stimulus has never extended to a desire to put it at risk. Telecom acquisition team member Steve Walker remembers Gibbs ruminating late one evening after a meal in Philadelphia in 1989 while they were chasing the Telecom deal: *Alan told me, ‘Look, I’ve got 100 million dollars,’ or some such figure. ‘It wouldn’t make a scrap of difference to my lifestyle if I had another 100 million dollars; but it would make a big difference and would seriously piss me off if I lost $50 million.’*[18](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477355-616451090-18)"