Founded by Max Farndale 1947 - 2018
France’s English-speaking colony
The Franco-German investment in New Zealand is just as extensive in its way as the British presence was in its heyday prior to UK membership of the EU. This is the main reason why the New Zealand/EU (sans Britain) trade deal is regarded with such favour by the two pillars of the EU. The scope of the French presence in New Zealand is especially pervasive encompassing as it does so many industrial sectors. It is one reason why New Zealand premier John Key seen here on the reviewing stand with French cabinet members was accorded such a warm welcome in Paris (photo: Roland Berjon)
In order of industry dominance here are the major French-owned companies in New Zealand:-
These are just the French companies with site operations here. We can also consider L’Oreal, and in the industrial category, Laval, Michelin and St-Gobain (glass) which is also the world’s longest established company.
If we look at the Franco-German EU axis, then we can also see complete dominance in the luxury car sector here with BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Citroen, Renault.
The presence of Danone and Parmalat underline the way in which French companies, after some delay, are filling the pastoral process vacuum left by the old British companies.
The arrival of Bollore in New Zealand with the acquisition of Gameloft is a pointer to French intervention here in computer inspired leisure.
from the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Wednesday 12 October 2016
1. You predicted pre-BREXIT the end of the EU. But did you envisage at this time anything like the Deutsche Bank crisis?
Yes, Deutsche Bank has been in crisis for many years. I did write about it late last year in November in the Australian Financial Review. I put my thoughts down this way:-
“Bankers are overpaid, bonus payments are useless and there is an inflation of fancy job titles in banking
“That was the essence of a speech recently delivered at Frankfurt’s Goethe University.
“Had the speaker been a sociology professor in a graduate seminar, that would not be worth reporting. But when the new chief executive of Deutsche Bank turns on his own industry in such harsh words, that is a different story.”
I first wrote about the sorry state of German banking in 2010:
So I always thought that sooner or later the problems in Germany’s banking system would come to the surface, and they now have for all the world to see.
2. In general how would you rank the problems facing the EU now in terms of immigration, terrorism, finance for example? The EU faces so many problems simultaneously, it’s hard to even rank them. I think banking, finance and monetary policy remain the most important problems. Security and immigration are a massive headache, too – not least the EU’s stance on Russia and Turkey. And then there is the minor complication of Brexit.
3. How much water will any NZ/EU free trade agreement hold? I am relatively confident we will see EU/NZ FTA. Having said that, any free trade initiatives are highly contentious in Europe, just think of CETA (Canada) and TTIP (US). Finding an agreement with NZ is not at the top of the EU’s priority list.
4. Your forecast on the US presidential election? It will be a bad outcome. Regardless who wins. Neither of the candidates has any idea on how to deal with America’s long-term fiscal problems. Neither of them is pro trade. Neither will touch the US welfare state. The Americans only have the choice what kind of mess they prefer.
5. How do you see the TPPA emerging from this? The best we can hope for is for a lame-duck President Obama to sign it before his successor has a chance to kill the deal.
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Tuesday 4 October 2016
More on the weasel word
Dear Sir,
The term transparent is as your correspondent correctly observed is dangerous in that it conveys the impression of underpinning specialist knowledge. It is as if a person whose medical knowledge was confined to what they had gleaned from popular magazines and television shows went around cocktail parties telling people that they were in the best of health.
In fact even professional auditors sign off their reports with the qualification that their audit report is based only on the data supplied.
Your correspondent correctly blames the word transparent on the false confidence prior to the collapse of New Zealand’s secondary banking industry.
In the event, neither were professional auditors in a position to divine the true circumstances of the submitted balance sheets. This was because of the accounting convention in which liabilities can be safely posted on the assets side of the ledger.
In the run up to the finance sector crash this took the form of unpaid interest which should have been written off appearing on the asset side of the ledger as an unpaid debt and thus as an asset.
The same goes for the original capital sum, by now clearly a bad debt, appearing as an asset.
Yours
James Springhall
Perfectly incorrect pseudo accounting term must be replaced
Island State is Running Out of Patience.
Geopolitics penetrated Wellington last night when at the Republic of China’s national day celebrations there was let rip from the podium a scathing condemnation of Beijing’s veto of Taiwan’s right to participate in the International Civil Aviation Organisation conference.
The veto was calculated to hit the island state’s sensitive spot. Beijing’s official reason was that the veto was the response to Taipei’s recent political developments, writes our diplomatic roundsman.
In effect the ICAO veto snub was calculated to hit Taiwan in one of its newest and most important economic areas – tourism. In the line of Beijing’s fire was also cross-strait investment between the two Chinas.
Also conveniently in this line of fire was President Obama’s Asia pivot in which Taipei is the eastern fulcrum.
Even more directly in the cross-hairs of this is the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement signed off by all contributing nations in Auckland this year.
Beijing views many of these nations, Taiwan especially, as being under its own suzerainty and not Washington’s.
The Taiwan national day is off the beaten track for government people such as diplomats and also for the media.
Usually the event includes a brisk reeling off of the nations’ over achievement in defined areas of productivity, foreign exchange, and growth in general along with the way all this has harmonised with Western-style ambitions in multiculturalism and social equity.
But on this occasion the wraps were taken off and Beijing singled out for its obvious obstructionism. Officially the Taiwan representation in New Zealand is known as the Taipei Economic & Cultural Office.
Taiwan’s official embassy which was in Burnell Avenue Thorndon was abruptly closed when under the direction of president Richard Nixon the United States recognised Beijing.
The official broadside at the national day was also a reminder to the West which is currently preoccupied and in various forms by the immigration issue and the problems it has spawned.
The United States tilt toward Asia corresponds and thus conflicts with Beijing’s parallel push into this area and simultaneously also into the MENA area, Middle East North Africa.
The strong and deliberate words delivered at the usually subdued Wellington celebration of Taiwan’s national day indicate that the temperature in all this is rising.
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Thursday 6 October 2016
New Zealand’s beleaguered developer ready with major global tech breakthroughs
Kim Dotcom might have faded in New Zealand, his adopted country that wants to evict him. But he is on fire in Europe with his Megaupload2 product which threatens to introduce a startling new tech innovation in the form of the marriage of file and money handling.
His new Megaupload2 product devolves into BNK2TheFuture (banking in the future) and Bitcache which is under the co-development of Englishman Simon Dickson of Bitcoin, writes our European correspondent.New Zealand’s latest information technology product takes the global IT industry into an entirely new sphere in terms of block size processing. The blocks being the size of the chunk of machine language that can be processed in any given split-second.
Traversing the block size bottleneck will give the new Megaupload2 the ability to process the mass micro finance/ file sharing transactions that gave its Mark 1 version Megaupload five percent of the world file sharing market.
According to Kim Dotcom the unique selling proposition of this new version from the user point of view will be complete security in terms of user identity and of content.
The scheme is to bestow economies of scale on content transactions in the entire news and publishing sphere which according to Mr Dotcom have both suffered from a mechanical inability to simultaneously issue something and then get paid for it.
In Europe Mr Dotcom is known as “Washington’s Most Wanted Pirate.”
He was originally settled in New Zealand, though nobody wants to talk about it, in order to ginger up the entire information technology sector which enjoyed a promising commercial start in the 1970s.
But since then the sector has declined into an import added value one. Or into sectors such as games where New Zealand has taken on a sweat-shop role.
In blending micro finance and file transfer Mr Dotcom, if still a New Zealand resident, will make up a troika of New Zealand international computer pathfinders. The other two being Leslie John Comrie of Papakura who invented the computer bureau and Bill Phillips of Dannevirke who invented computer modelling .
If Mr Dotcom can solve the block size bottleneck his place in volume trading and thus in IT history will be assured.
Meanwhile in the role of a prophet decidedly without fame in his own country, or at least, his ungrateful adopted one, Mr Dotcom may see certain changes in his favour in the New Zealand –United States relationship.
It will be recalled that for reasons that remain unexplained to this day, the original Megaupload server farms were located in the United States.
This gave the FBI the power to pull the plug on the entire Megaupload service. Then launch a campaign to extradite Mr Dotcom to the United States in order to face piracy charges.
What followed was the most picaresque series of judicial events in New Zealand history complete with a bizarre airborne storming of the Dotcom digs in suburban Auckland.
Mr Dotcom says that his new venture will attract the most “brilliant” information technology practitioners, and that he will remain constantly in the background guiding its fortunes.
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Monday 10 October 2016
Widely used technology routinely ignored in New Zealand claims process engineer.
European technology that converts milk and meat processing plant effluent into self- contained waste consuming and energy generating plants is now available in New Zealand.Napier industrialist Ken Evans said the technology allowed milk and meat processing plants to become their own standalone waste treatment units with the added advantage of these plants using the waste so consumed as their own source of energy.
As an example he cited large scale milking centres in Europe that were self sufficient in power simply because all the waste they generated was converted into electricity.He said that the era in which factories could discharge their waste in any volume or in any proportion into the public domain should have ended many years ago. It was now time to apply a readily available solution, and one widely used internationally, he said.
The problem he said was that there had not been the concerted nationwide will to do something about process waste finding its way into the water system.This he said was itself a by-product of uncertainty about the ability of technology to cope with the problem.
“You look at the situation today in which vehicles that drive themselves are now on the roads. Yet we still have copious amounts of concentrated waste matter allowed to penetrate the nation’s water system.”
He said that waste-to-energy plant technology in primary processing had been allowed to be placed in the “too hard” basket.
He said that the conservation lobby had allowed itself to become over-focused on international issues at the expense of seeking solutions to problems in what he described as the nation’s “back yard.”
He said that he would now ensure that milk and meat processors in New Zealand were acquainted with this waste-to-energy solution that was so widely used in Europe. His objective he said was to make New Zealand’s processing plants their own waste consumers, and thus their own energy suppliers.
It was he said a relatively low cost solution, and one with its own pay-back. This proven technology was now readily available in New Zealand backed by his specialists with the experience to install it.
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Monday 5 September 2016Ken Evans can be contacted on phone 64 6 843 0632 , mobile 64 027 293 2678 and by email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
Offers invited over $9,000
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
Offers invited over $1,500
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
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