Obituary: Sir Douglas Myers, audacious business leader and champion of the free market

Thursday, 13 April 2017

'No male in our family has ever failed,' a young Douglas Myers once heard his grandmother bluntly tell his father.

The words burned themselves into his mind.

'The memory of what she said stayed with me for probably 40 years. A bit of fear injected at the right time, for the right people, can actually be pretty positive.'

Myers didn't fail. Born into the cream of Auckland wealth and privilege, he spent his career becoming vastly more wealthy – even, for a decade or so, 'New Zealand's richest man'.

He did it by taking over and transforming his venerable family business (which prompted a bitter legal battle with some relatives), and by launching audacious corporate takeovers, such as the one he sprang on the brewing giant Lion in 1981.

When he cashed his chips 17 years later, he netted some $470 million. Even that exit deal sparked acrimony, though, because small shareholders were not offered the same price. (The Australian Financial Review called it a 'real shocker' that left the little guys 'lying helpless at the bottom of a ruck'.)

In recent years, NBR's rich list put his wealth at $900m.

Unlike many on the list, Myers did not shy from the public spotlight, especially in the 1980s and 90s. Excited by the reforming zeal of the Fourth Labour government, he threw himself into the free market revolution, most notably as a founder of the Business Roundtable.

'New Zealanders have suffered from mollycoddling by politicians with their cradle-to-grave philosophies,' he told Metro magazine in 1986 in a typical diagnosis. 'Even the thickest New Zealander can't go believing that New Zealand is contributing anywhere near its potential.'

Myers was born in 1938 in Auckland, where he grew up in a mansion overlooking the Hauraki Gulf, in a household with a cook and servants.

His Canadian mother Margaret was the life of the place. She also bore a close resemblance to Douglas, whose faintly melancholy, pale blue eyes were always a striking feature of his appearance. His father Kenneth was a patrician character who had been running the family business, Campbell and Ehrenfried, since 1933. 

That business already stretched back three generations to German-Jewish immigrant Louis Ehrenfried, who had acquired a string of breweries and hotels in the late 19th century. Lacking any direct male heirs, he handed control on to his nephew, Arthur Myers (later Auckland mayor). He in turn passed the operation to his son Kenneth, who ran it in a cautious and successful style through the middle of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, Douglas attended Auckland's elite King's College, where he was a champion swimmer but a middling student. His memories of the place were not all happy – they included being beaten up by other students. One of his great pleasures in later decades, he told his biographer and current Cabinet minister Paul Goldsmith, was to see such bullies amount to nothing.

'Everyone needs to find some motivation in life, and to prove some of those pricks wrong become one of mine. Revenge is sweet motivation.'

After school, Myers went to Britain's Cambridge University. It opened his eyes to what a staid and conservative place New Zealand was, he often said.

'I could have left school and been wiped out by the old Kiwi drift,' he recalled. 'Instead, I was lucky enough to get out of New Zealand, see how much more broadening and opening life was elsewhere and to be stimulated rather than frightened by it.'

Yet there was still something of the drifter in his years after Cambridge. He spent time working in French vineyards and waiting tables in Hawaii, chasing girls and adopting a more liberal view on sex. He contemplated staying in Europe indefinitely.

In the end, he returned home in the mid-1960s and threw himself into the family business. He decided to concentrate on alcohol sales, and stripped away Campbell and Ehrenfried's other interests, which ranged from hotels to credit cards.

In 1971, he set up a joint venture, New Zealand Wine and Spirits, with New Zealand Breweries. It included a far-sighted provision that the larger company would have to buy him out if ever he wanted to sell. Soon after, he married his first wife, Auckland model Stephanie Overton, with whom he had three children. 

During the 1970s, he moved aggressively to consolidate control of his diffusely-owned family firm, buying all the shares from his relatives and other minor shareholders. But some of them revolted and took him to court, arguing that he had 'fraudulently misrepresented' the value of the company.

A high-profile, six-year legal battle followed, which Myers labelled 'the worst experience of my life'. After an initial victory in the High Court, he and his father lost at the Court of Appeal, where the judges ordered him to pay a new, much higher share price to the winning family members.

Myers put the verdict down to anti-business judges, but critics took it as evidence of his ruthless and unethical streak.

Arguably his crowning act of daring came in the early 1980s when he exercised his right to sell up the joint venture with New Zealand Breweries, now Lion Breweries – then promptly borrowed $27 million, an enormous sum at the time, to buy a controlling stake in Lion itself.

The risks were high, but the manouevre worked and he was managing director of Lion by late 1982. Again, he immediately set about reforming the company, even symbolically tweaking the company lion logo to include testicles.

'They had actually removed the balls – it was inconceivable,' he said of his predecessors.

Further mergers and acquisitions followed – the company became Lion Nathan in 1988, then swallowed troubled Australian tycoon Alan Bond's breweries, before Myers retired in 1998.

Myers believed his ability to take risks, his thirst for improvements, and even his sense of paranoia had all helped his business career. He famously told one journalist he had 'no great strengths and have never shone at anything', but had been good at seeing others' talents.

Myers never let up on what he saw as New Zealand's need to take the reforms of the 1980s further. He railed against everything from customs duties on a porcelain dinner set he bought in London, to government restrictions on raw-milk cheeses. He argued for a time limit on the dole and criticised councils around the country, such as the 'People's Republic of Christchurch', for spending too frivolously.

Myers had a mixed view of his country, which he thought small-minded and too willing to attack the rich. But he also called himself a proud Kiwi, led Lion's sponsorship of national icons like the All Blacks and Team New Zealand, and put money into institutions such as the University of Auckland.

He wasn't always consistent about his wealth either. He told one interviewer it had made him 'extraordinarily happy' but another that being born into such privilege was the 'worst thing' .

'All the socialistic envy doesn't worry me,' he told yet another. 'It just worries those who feel it. And I don't give a stuff. That's why I've got peace of mind.'

In his final years, Myers bought a super-yacht, sailed around the world with his second wife Barbara, whom he had met in Tahiti in the 1980s, and based himself in London. He was knighted in 2010.

Upon learning his cancer was terminal, he said he became weepy for a few weeks then came to terms with it. He was grateful he had had time for reminiscences, improving some relationships and spending time with his family.

Sir Arthur Douglas Myers, brewing magnate: b Auckland, October 29, 1938, m Stephanie (diss), 2d, 1s; Barbara; d London, April 8, 2017, aged 78.

* An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Douglas Myers' mother as Susan. Her name was Margaret Myers.