The Herald’s publisher is reopening nominations for boardroom directors in an attempt to stave off Jim Grenon’s aggressive takeover bid, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.
To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.
NZME strikes back
After weeks of forward momentum, Jim Grenon’s attempted boardroom coup at NZME has hit resistance. The board has struck back, delaying its annual shareholders’ meeting by five weeks to early June and reopening the nomination process for directors. In a letter to shareholders, the board said it had received new information from Grenon’s camp over the weekend – including an updated proposed board structure – that warranted closer scrutiny. The Herald’s Shayne Currie (Premium paywalled) notes that the board’s letter raised concerns with all Grenon’s proposals, “including independence, experience, continuity, and gender diversity”. The board also voiced its worry that Grenon could gain editorial influence over its stable of brands and titles, most notably the NZ Herald.
Grenon, a Canadian-born billionaire now based in New Zealand, bought a 9.3% share in NZME in March through his company JTG 4 and immediately launched his campaign to gain control of the company’s board. He insists his interest in editorial direction is minimal but has also said he wants to see an “emphasis on factual accuracy, less selling of the writer’s opinion and appealing to a wider political spectrum”.
Troy Bowker enters the fray
The latest flashpoint in the NZME boardroom standoff is the proposed directorship of businessman Troy Bowker. In his letter to the NZME board, Grenon suggested Bowker as an alternate director (a fill-in of sorts, if required) for nominee Des Gittings; as part of its response, the board singled out a 2023 text Bowker sent to BusinessDesk founding editor Pattrick Smellie: “With subscription services that claim to be a business news site, I don’t want to read any stories that piss me off.” Board chair Barbara Chapman said it suggested Bowker “was against appealing to a wide range of perspectives”, adding: “We worry what this might do to maintaining a broad audience and its impact on staff and revenue.”
Bowker, whose firm Caniwi Capital holds just over 3.5% of NZME shares, has rejected the framing as a personal attack and said the quote was “cherry-picked”, reports Shayne “Media Insider” Currie, who has been all over this story. A self-described champion of free speech, Bowker argues he was merely pushing for BusinessDesk to publish “good quality business news” rather than “social commentary with a left political bias”. It’s not the first time Bowker has found himself in hot water over comments some would consider ill-advised. In 2021, he found himself in the centre of a media firestorm after he accused Sir Ian Taylor of “sucking up to the left Māori-loving agenda”.
Who is Jim Grenon?
Wealthy, relentless and deeply private, Jim Grenon cuts an unusual figure in New Zealand’s corporate landscape. Newsroom’s Tim Murphy writes that the investor is “like a dog with a bone” in business and litigation alike. Over two decades, Grenon has engaged in complex and sometimes extraordinary tax battles with Canadian authorities, including one that stemmed from an $11,800 legal fee deduction and ballooned into a 14-year saga. In another case, courts found he’d engaged in “abusive” tax avoidance using minors as nominal investors. In a response published in the Herald, Grenon says that in Canada, “tax avoidance is allowed, it is only ‘abusive’ tax avoidance that allows the court to use GAAR [general anti-avoidance rule]… It is nothing like as damning a label as you may think.” Lawyers representing Grenon companies are now trying to appeal to Canada’s Supreme Court.
“People who’ve engaged with Grenon over the years are in no doubt that his is a firm, pretty uncompromising, centre-right social and political worldview,” writes Murphy. The fear among many who work at NZME – and among its audiences – is that Grenon’s beliefs are significantly more extreme than that description would suggest. As Duncan Greive writes in The Spinoff, Grenon’s previous media start-ups Centrist and NZNE “are aggregation sites with a smattering of original content. They are largely preoccupied with a small handful of issues – trans rights, Treaty coverage and vaccine efficacy and injuries”.
Decoding Centrist
In a deep dive into Centrist’s content, The Press’s Charlie Mitchell (paywalled) notes that the sites it aggregates from include the anti-China, Falun Gong-funded Epoch Times; right-wing blog ZeroHedge; and a website run by Paul Joseph Watson, a former protégé of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. “Centrist’s right-wing perspective isn’t inherently problematic,” writes Mitchell. “The potential concern is how it may be perceived as repackaging right-wing views as neutral (or ‘centrist’) while sometimes bypassing standard journalistic practices that inform readers and ensure accountability.”
While Grenon established Centrist, he has not been a director or shareholder since August 2023. He has dismissed any comparison between Centrist and his future plans for NZME as “a leap”, describing them as two very distinct publications with different mandates.
- Is this the ad that sparked Jim Grenon’s NZME takeover? (Stuff)
- Analysing the Grenon Letters – and is Trade Me buying Stuff? (The Spinoff’s Fold podcast)
