The biz: Rail ride as a service to nation

Hold the front page: an Act Party press release has announced that deputy leader Ken Shirley and his wife, Jenny, travelled from Tauranga to Auckland on the Kaimai Express yesterday, with a return trip to Tauranga today.

Mr Shirley is a regular traveller between Tauranga and Auckland but has "never caught the train before" on the route, the release declares.

Opposing the idea of taxpayers' money propping up transport services - "there's no place for subsidising trains simply to satisfy some sort of nostalgic romanticism, as the Greens want to do," Mr Shirley promises a report on his experience.

Hot with anticipation over the Act-er's railway adventures, the newsrooms of the nation await further instalments of the week's activities: "Train Found Wanting," "Ken Shirley decides earrings nothing to do with Darwinism," or "Hefty Act Party fax bill paid by anonymous millionaire donor" perhaps?

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The newly mandated GlobalCo has the public relations world licking its paws in readiness to pounce on what will be the largest account in the country.

It started last December, when at the GlobalCo merger announcement publicists were clustered around then-chief executive frontrunner Craig Norgate like bees to honey, but has continued as the CEO appointment has proved stickier than first imagined, a decision now twice delayed.

In regards to the matter of the appointment, our Biz staffer says "unfortunately, no smoke, black or grey, has yet risen from the Vat(ican)."

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In middle of the on-going "Lion Nathan v Allied Domecq for Montana Group" rhubarb, a reader points out an interesting historical side note.

It turns out that in the late 1960s, Lion chairman Douglas Myers worked for the then Allied Breweries company in Britain as part of his "apprenticeship" before coming back to New Zealand to run Campbell & Ehrenfried.

In 1981, 10 years to the day after the agreement which established NZ Wines & Spirits as a partnership between NZ Breweries and C&E, he exercised the option to call on Breweries to buy his share in NZW&S, and then used the funds to get a chunk of Breweries, which was renamed Lion Corporation, which later merged with LD Nathan to become Lion Nathan, which is, of course, fighting tooth and nail to protect its leadership in Montana - a company in which Mr Myers has been both substantial shareholder and director previously.

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A curious media advisory last week drew our attention to a new speech from the Reserve Bank Deputy Governor Rod Carr, entitled Banking on Capital Punishment.

We wondered if the RBNZ was looking to enlighten the populace on the positive mental benefits of some Government-sponsored B&D before breakfast.

We were doubly suspicious on reading that Mr Carr's speech contained "no information about monetary policy."

The Biz can confirm, however, the speech's enigmatic title was a reference to the RBNZ's rather less titillating but far weightier banking supervision role, and nothing more.

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Saturday's rugby test match between France and New Zealand at the Cake Tin in Wellington offered up a most timely sight: former CTU head and present NZ Post director Ken Douglas, not viewing the match from the Post-box but instead comfortably ensconced in BIL's hospitality suite.