Busy man with an eye for assets that need to work harder

Enza is a problem child for GPG, but some doubt the raider's NZ chairman can turn his hand to tough love, writes PHILIPPA STEVENSON.

It wouldn't do to have your bum hanging out of your pants when you're about to ask for $250 million from the mum and dad investors of New Zealand.

So Tony Gibbs is off to change his trousers before pitching Guinness Peat Group's first capital notes issue to would-be investors at Auckland's Stamford Plaza.

There's only a small tear in the back of his favourite pinstripe pants but Mr Gibbs, whose PR minder has just described him as exacting, demanding and determined, is not taking any chances with his image.

The profile of Sir Ron Brierley's lieutenant in the New Zealand wing of GPG has taken enough of a hiding lately anyway, thanks to a stoush between pipfruit exporter Enza and its grower suppliers over liability for a $50 million foreign exchange debt.

Mr Gibbs has chaired the near-monopoly marketer since last August after a raid in classic Brierley/GPG style netted the company 19 per cent of the former producer board's shares.

GPG paid $6 million to cash-strapped growers for the shareholding which, only a month later, analysts said was probably worth nearly four times as much.

The Fay Richwhite offshoot, FR Partners, joined GPG in the foray, which required each company to qualify as export apple suppliers under the constitution of the newly corporatised, grower-owned Enza.

They met the qualification by leasing small Hawkes Bay orchards, easily and cheaply slipping through a constitutional loophole that few even knew existed.

It wasn't a big deal - GPG's worldwide investments total $1.2 billion - but it was a good one because it gave the corporate investors control of a company which by law had the right to export most of New Zealand's $700 million apple crop.

But with the control has come the forex controversy, souring the apple before it could ripen as the nice little earner Mr Gibbs thought he had, and needs.

Mr Gibbs is under pressure to perform - for GPG shareholders, but probably more importantly to him personally, among his fellow henchmen in Sir Ron's battle-hardened platoon of corporate raiders.

GPG's New Zealand investments make up only 6 per cent of the global portfolio, but it's a mixed bag and the company's share price has been sluggish. It can chalk up something like a $1 million a month return from an 18 month investment in rural services company Wrightson but also has the bottomless pit of mining company Otter Gold, the share price of which has gone as low as 11c from its year high of 36c in February. It's getting harder to find the typical GPG target - an undervalued, underperforming company ripe for a quick but rewarding wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

And the squeeze is on Mr Gibbs because New Zealand is home to him, Sir Ron and many of the 28,000 GPG investors that Mr Gibbs likes to call "ordinary mums and dads".

The reputation of the now Sydney-based Sir Ron and his Auckland-based mate are on the line here like nowhere else.

Mr Gibbs is touchy about the public relations disaster that Enza has been for most of this year. He calls the company "a problem child". There are plenty who think he is not the right man to parent the delinquent.

One commentator suggests that Mr Gibbs, who he says is "no great strategist", has come a gutser - just like others who thought it simple to make a buck in the rural sector.

"They think rural New Zealand has got a good product, that farmers don't know what they're doing and that with their management they can turn it around. They don't understand the complexities."

Says a business associate: "Enza is not just another corporate play. You've got to take 1100 growers and the Government with you. Diplomacy is not one of his best skills."

In fact a trawl of friends, foes, business colleagues, analysts and commentators suggests Mr Gibbs has many qualities - none of them tact.

In business and social life Mr Gibbs, whose grey hair and beard make him seem older than his 53 years, is described as likeable, charming, even charismatic and a great orator.

Unsurprisingly, for someone who happily likens business to battles, he also earns such epithets as aggressive, abrasive, uncompromising, inflexible, confrontational and downright scary.

Mr Gibbs doesn't mind some of the harsher descriptions, and while one former business associate suggests he would rather be known as a corporate leader than a raider, Mr Gibbs doesn't bridle at the term.

He points out one of the many cartoons on GPG's boardroom walls marking significant events in company history. It depicts Sir Ron and his key righthand men as pirates aboard a ship. Mr Gibbs is in the crow's nest, presumably spying out the next quarry.

It's particularly apt in Mr Gibbs' case. At 15, he ran away to sea, getting a job on a ship carrying frozen lamb carcases from Lyttelton to England.

Mr Gibbs says he never was much good at school, and was a bored and restless youngster. His parents knew of his plan to leave the country but were not happy their eldest son should set out from their Titirangi home hardly out of the short pants of Kelston Boys High School.

They had emigrated from Romford in England 11 years earlier, presumably to give their two sons a better life. Maybe it was the wrench of being parted from a son so early, or maybe, as Mr Gibbs thinks, his parents, "religious in their own way", wanted to give something back but during his six years overseas they adopted two more baby boys.

Mr Gibbs, though, was dealing with restlessness by travelling the world, living and working everywhere from a kibbutz in Israel where he herded cattle on horseback, to working the phones and the customers in a London export business.

There, in the OE Kiwi's de facto hometown, the now 23-year-old met a similarly restless spirit, his English wife-to-be, Val, just back from voluntary teaching service in Uganda. They married six months after meeting, carried on working in England but when, a year later, daughter Charlotte, now 30, was on the way decided to settle in New Zealand. Their second child, Anthony, was born four years later.

Back in New Zealand, with no formal educational qualifications, Mr Gibbs worked for a few businesses before setting up a sporting goods import-export business, dealing in everything from slate to balls for billiards tables.

In 1978, just before his 30th birthday, he sold the business "and for the first time in my life I had some money".

He bought a house and began investing in property and the stock market. His investing brought him into contact with Brierley Investments which opened an Auckland office "and asked me if I'd like to babysit it".

Moving in a world of university degree-toting analysts was initially a bit daunting for a guy running only with on-the-job experience. Today he's relaxed about "all the PhDs" and revels in his accomplishments and the "detective" work of discovering, analysing and, yes, raiding a company's shares.

"There's nothing like a bit of grey hair," he says, tapping his head and momentarily looking disconcertingly like a cross between Inspectors Clouseau and Morse.

The involvement with BIL grew to the extent that Mr Gibbs can now run off a list of past directorships a quarter of a page long, including Masport, Top Group, Union Shipping, and Kupe Group.

Another quarter page lists previous directorships under Sir Ron's latter vehicle, GPG, including Colonial Motor Company, Medic Aid, NZ Guardian Trust and Australia-based Tyndall.

The current list includes Turners and Growers, which he chairs, Otter Gold, Sholto Investments, Joe White Maltings and, of course, Enza.

"We're not always welcome when we buy but it's interesting that they hate us to leave," says Mr Gibbs, who rejects descriptions of GPG as an asset-stripper or looter.

The company consists of 14 people worldwide. Mr Gibbs and his personal assistant are the entire New Zealand staff.

"We work very hard and diligently to make the companies work and be more efficient."

The turnarounds of ailing Turners and Growers, and Wrightson are high on his scorecard of success. Others are less sure, and say such a small team does not have the resources to build up businesses.

"They [GPG] are not corporate doctors. Tony goes from board meeting to board meeting. How can he do them justice?" says a company director.

A Wrightson insider believes the company had already made the changes to reverse its slide, which was then greatly assisted by the rural recovery.

Mr Gibbs, though, is adamant GPG has a vital role in New Zealand commerce.

"We're a bit like the grease that keeps capitalist companies moving. If there are lazy assets lying around, if things are a bit sticky and there are a few problems, they are ideal companies for GPG to take a stake in and turn things around."

He has few interests outside business. He and Val, a keen gardener, call home their seaside house at Matakana, north of Auckland, where they have what's believed to be the country's second largest mandarin orchard of 50,000 trees.

They have an apartment in Auckland's Herne Bay, but spend a large amount of time travelling the world, mostly work-related but squeezing in short holiday breaks and visits to their children in Paris and Sydney either side of business meetings.

"It's a busy, busy life," he says. And the main thing spoiling it right now is Enza.

He has occasionally sought out the press to pour some of the GPG lubricant into a receptive ear but the media spotlight on him over Enza has rattled him. He complains about the use of a Herald file photograph showing him a bit dishevelled, and was distressed when the Holmes programme "interviewed" an apple when he declined to appear on television over the forex issue.

In the larger GPG scheme Enza is "so minute it doesn't matter", he says.

"But just because it's getting tough do you think I'm going to quit? No. I'm not going to quit. We've got to fix it."

A key question for many is if GPG people know when to quit.

Sir Ron has said there will be an optimum time to end GPG, and Mr Gibbs quotes Sir Ron on the life cycle of companies: "When we think there is no more value we can add, the best thing we can do then is give the money back and go home."

But with GPG looking to match the $250 million it already has in its war chest with the same figure from the capital notes, that time is clearly not close.

"It's pretty fair to say we are going to be around for another five years, because that is the life of the capital notes."

The old war horses are getting on, he says, as though they are about to ride off into the sunset. But, he adds, a few younger analysts are coming up through the ranks, too.

And then, as though a cold breeze had whipped through that hole in his trousers and around his vitals he contemplates the raider getting raided. "It's possible we'll get taken over. It's always possible."