KEY POINTS:
Honey, I know: there is no charity to care for spivvy Porsche-drivers so I'm on a hiding to nothing trying to drum up any sympathy for Rod Petricevic, the man who fell to earth over finance company Bridgecorp.
But all the same, I am not so sure that
even if he is an estate-bottled ocean-going copper-bottomed bastard, that he is getting a fair go.
I am not doing special pleading for a pal - I have only met the fellow once, briefly, when he was having Friday lunch at a neighbouring table with a bunch of leggy Bridgecorp bints at Auckland wine bar Merlot. Anyway, he was excruciatingly defensive around the media, so he wasn't exactly a chatty-chops.
So this isn't about Petricevic, per se, more about our attitude to failure.
It is a trendy refrain in the business community that New Zealanders don't understand that failure goes with risk-taking ("experience of failure should be part of the entrepreneur's toolkit," observed one astute CEO only last week in The Business).
Find a successful wealth creator who has never ever had a failure, and well, you won't. This failure-goes-with-success mantra is repeated frequently but does not seem to have sunk in.
Because when a company does fall over, there is still only one story in town: poor victims - "ordinary" geezers in John Campbell parlance - contrasted with bastard Porsche-driving capitalists.
Campbell's naming and shaming piece on TV3 contrasted the "effluent" lifestyle of Petricevic with the plight of the poor, ordinary victims who put their money in the company because they just, sniff, wanted a better life.
Campbell asked why Petricevic's estimated $10 million to $15 million in personal assets wasn't going to be sold up and given to out-of-pocket investors.
Let me help you out, John. Here are some possible reasons why.
For several hundred years our financial system has been based on the concept of the limited liability company. This allows people to start businesses without putting everything they own on the line.
The "corporate veil" can only be pierced if the individual in question has been found to be trading while insolvent, trading recklessly or putting away assets with the intention of defeating creditors. So, instead of getting easy peasy valuations on Petricevic's property portfolio, it might have been more helpful if the Campbell Live researchers were doing the real digging and investigating whether Petricevic was actually liable. How solid were the deals to flog off loans as the company foundered? What other deals were done at the 11th hour? How much was Petricevic paid in salary and benefits, and was it comparable to other finance company CEOs?
We don't know because the reporters were too busy artily editing pictures of Petricevic's house to Eric B and Rakim's Paid in Full. Thanks guys.
Another reason why investors have no right to demand a share of his house: they should have known what they were getting themselves in for.
There have been Eastlight files of stories about the risks of our unregulated finance company market. I was writing consistently about the risks of putting money with finance companies five years ago.
"Finance firms: over geared, over-exposed and over here" was the headline of one of my stories. "The burgeoning finance company scene is in for a shake-up with one or more failures to be expected," I reported three years ago.
I don't remember the television networks doing a big follow-up then. I am not expecting donations to flood in for the Save-the-Rod appeal, but maybe the real villain was the television network which took millions in finance company advertising dollars but never ran any stories about dodgy finance companies till one fell over?
