Ron Brierley, born in 1937, established his investment firm Brierley Investments Ltd (BIL) in 1961. He invested in companies with low share prices and valuable assets. His style of corporate raiding was not always welcomed by the stock exchange, which in the late 1960s refused to list BIL. However, in 1970, when this photo was taken, the company was listed. By 1984 it was the most valuable in terms of capitalisation on the stock exchange. Brierley, who was knighted in 1987, retired from control of BIL in 1990. Listen to his biographer, Yvonne van Dongen, talk in 1990 about why the stock exchange was unwilling to list BIL.
Transcript
Interviewer: Brierley Investments took a long time to get listed, that's one of the issues that you address in the book. Why did they take so long to gain acceptance?
Probably because from the beginning Ron was defying all accepted business conventions and accounting conventions and his accounts have always been rather difficult to understand and it was said in truth I think in the early sixties that they would've provided a searching test for any accounting student. So I think people erred on the side of caution when it came to the decision to list Briley Investments. They really just didn't understand what it was about and some of the things he did. You could either call them cunning or devious depending on your point of view.
Interviewer: You do spend quite a lot of time discussing his creative accounting as you say accounting's probably the only profession where the word creative carries, pejorative connotations.
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Reference: 7336
Image: Yvonne van Dongen, Brierley: the man behind the corporate legend, Auckland: Viking, 1990.
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