Actually, my sister didn't work for a Fletcher Challenge company in Christchurch, but rather for a Brierley Investments company, a bookstore called Whitcoulls, originally Whitcombe & Tombs.
Brierley was an authorative expert in the rationalisation of capital in New Zealand. His method of primitive accumulation from 1961 was relatively straightforward: he would initially buy up sleepy, undervalued companies in New Zealand and then revamp them, or else strip the assets, and then sell again, or sometimes he would continue to operate them, but at a higher profitability. This strategy really worked, he became really adept at stockmarket transactions, he knew the NZ economy like the back of his hand, and his empire grew enormous when the Fourth Labour Government deregulated and privatised the economy in the second half of the 1980s. Brierley International Ltd shifted its primary listing to Singapore in 2000. When I worked as research assistant in sociology in 1985, I spent a long time tracing out all of the different Brierley holdings, there was a whole web of subsidiaries and associated companies in the empire. The number of interlocking directorates became so great, that all the key "captains of industry" in New Zealand (population three and a half million) could be fitted into one room. Ernest Mandel had done something similar in Belgium, presenting a report on "Holdings and economic democracy" to the Belgian Trade Union Federation in the 1950s, but obviously the phenomenon of investment companies was not a uniquely Belgian phenomenon. As I have a lot to prepare, and as I am making errors in what I write, I will sign off for now. J.
