We were known internationally to be straight up. We had an instinctive aversion to greasing the palms of officials or well-connected people. Didn't like it, didn't trust it, didn't do it.
I'm sure we do sometimes but his general point rang true. We distrust this stuff.
The bit I found harder to believe was that our reputation was an advantage in bids for business overseas. But he was in a position to know and that is what he said.
The Prime Minister was in the Gulf pushing for a free-trade agreement a few months ago when we first discovered we had given a well-connected Saudi sheep dealer a $4 million farm and undertaken to supply him with $6 million in stock and equipment to settle a grievance that had been an obstacle to the agreement.
It was easy to agree with Labour's trade spokesman, David Parker, that this was "undermining the business ethic in New Zealand and the international reputation we have".
Murray McCully's explanation, that it would be an "agri-hub" shop window for New Zealand farm services in the Middle East, stretched credibility.
A stack of paper released to the press this week revealed the Government's advisers were never convinced either.
The Treasury was not consulted on whether the investment of public money looked likely to pay off. McCully's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade had a spare $10 million which he seemed to regard as petty cash.
The Treasury took a look at the proposal anyway and advised its minister, Bill English, not to support it. It repeated the advice when the proposal was still alive a year later, saying the benefits to New Zealand business remained unclear. The Auditor-General reviewed the initial business case and found it "weak".
Yet the deal was done, sometime after McCully got the Cabinet to agree in February, 2013.
It was to be a three-year pilot project, which means we must be at least half-way through it now. If it was providing commercial returns for New Zealand, McCully would be letting us know.
It doesn't appear to have advanced the free-trade agreement either. The engineer at that conference long ago was right, you can't trust deals done this way.
The one redeeming feature of the dismal saga to my mind is that the Saudis we have paid off did have a genuine grievance against us. They were encouraged to invest in sheep breeding here for the export of live lambs for slaughter in the Middle East.
They duly bought Hawkes Bay farms in the 1990s but a high death rate of sheep in transit made live exports controversial in New Zealand and the Labour Government called a halt to them from 2003.
National, when it returned in 2008, should have lifted the ban but it lacked the political courage.
Once it confirmed the prohibition on live exports it laid itself wide open to a compensation claim by the Saudis who had invested in developing a breed of sheep for the purpose.
The ban is a perfect example of the kind of "democratic" decisions that, no matter how impassioned they may be, can unfairly confiscate an investment made in good faith.
Compensation for confiscation is not corruption.
One of the Saudis involved, Sydney-based George Assad, has consistently called McCully's gift "compensation".
If that is the way it has been received our international reputation may not be harmed.
It could also explain why the gift has not done much for our free-trade agreement. The Saudis don't think they owe us anything.
In fact they may think they have let us off lightly if, as McCully told the Cabinet, they had legal advice suggesting they could sue us for $20 million to $30 million.
Obviously McCully doesn't want to call his payment compensation, implicitly admitting liability. So he has explained it in terms that are commercially unconvincing and lead us to suspect the worst. It was clumsy, not corrupt.
