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The National Business Review 2008 INFINZ Industry Awards Dinner has been another enjoyable and successful event. The expansion of the awards to include recognition of the Takeovers Code Rule 21Independent Reports, the ABN AMRO Independent Report Award, is a further example of how INFINZ is endeavouring to encourage quality outputs within all sectors and to recognise those who invest their resources and establish procedures and protocols to achieve excellence.
This award recognises that the Rule 21 reports play an important part in the proper outcomes of corporate activity in our capital markets. They are particularly important for retail investors who haven’t the capability to fully analyse and understand the intricacies of companies and corporate actions. They are also useful to institutional investors and major shareholders who require a benchmark against which to assess their own analysis.
The quality of the nominations for the ABN AMRO Excellence in Treasury Award and the Trustee Executors Debt Deal of the Year Award is an ongoing indication of both the standing of the awards and the serious approach taken to presenting the nominations for consideration by the judges. Our thanks, of course, go to the judges: Pip Dunphy, Tim Preston, Mary-Jane Daly, Nigel Williams, Godfrey Boyce and Geoff Taylor who were joined this year by the independent report judges BNZ Professor of Finance Jerry Bowman, Guy Hallwright and Warren Couillault.
The 2008 Awards saw a change in the scope of the fund manager award. It now focuses solely on New Zealand equities and the sponsor, Chapman Tripp, was happy to continue its long-term support of this award in its revamped form. The Chapman Tripp Equity Fund Manager Award has adopted this narrower focus to enable the successful and well respected boutique equity specialists to participate. The move to pure equities was not a difficult step. Indeed, Melville Jessup Weaver (MJW) who undertake the analysis behind the awards suggest that removing the bond and cash component from past results would have had no impact on the winner. Phil Williams, now of Esam Cushing but previously head of ANZ Investment Management, joined Mark Weaver of MJW, Deepak Gupta and Paul Hocking on the judging panel.
Meanwhile, INFINZ recently made a submission to the Justice and Electoral Select Committee of Parliament on the Real Estate Agents Bill. The full submission is posted on the INFINZ website. The submission addressed two aspects of the Bill. The first was its definition of a transaction. As it currently stands, a transaction that should only be undertaken by a person licensed as a real estate agent includes “the sale, purchase, or disposal or acquisition of any business, either with or without any interest in land”.
Clearly this definition captures many of the transactions that our industry rightly sees as needing the skills of an investment banker, corporate finance advisor or business broker rather than someone skilled in real estate or licensed as a real estate agent. Indeed, it is our contention that needing to be a licensed real estate agent in order to be an investment banker, corporate finance advisor or a business broker is nonsense. We have suggested that this clause defining a transaction in the Bill be removed in its entirety. The second point we made in our submission was that the penalties proposed to apply to real estate agents are totally out of kilter with the draconian penalties applied by other legislation on investment advisers, brokers and financial advisors. There seems little justification in imposing a maximum penalty of $40,000 on an individual and $100,000 on a corporate in the Bill when the maximum penalty on an individual under the Securities Markets Act and the Financial Advisors Bill is $100,000 and on a corporate is $300,000.
It is disappointing to once again see a lack of conformity between legislation supposedly aimed at protecting the investing public albeit in different investment arenas. It is hoped that the penalties are aligned. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to have our industry’s penalties dropped rather than real estate agent’s penalties increased. It is, after all, primarily a penalty in our industry relating to disclosure of information rather than a measure of the quality and appropriateness of the advice being given and that must surely be the most important aspect of the relationship.
Paul Hocking
Executive Director, INFINZ
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