ANZ wins Roger Award 2009

by Murray Horton

CAFCA

The full Judges’ Report is available at www.cafca.org.nz, follow the Roger Award links from the Homepage.

Finalists: ANZ, BNZ, Infratil, Newmont, Rio Tinto Aluminium NZ, Rymans, Telecom, Transpacific and Westpac. There were two finalists for the Accomplice Award – the Business Round Table, and the Auckland City Council and its officials (as part of the nomination of Transpacific Industries).

Criteria: the transnational (a corporation which is 25% or more foreign-owned) which is worst in each or all of the following:  Economic Dominance - Monopoly, profiteering, tax dodging, cultural imperialism. People - Unemployment, impact on tangata whenua, women, children, abuse of workers/conditions, health and safety of workers and the public, cultural imperialism. Environment - Environmental damage, abuse of animals. Political interference - Cultural imperialism, running an ideological crusade. 

Judges: Paul Corliss, from Christchurch, a life member of the Rail and Maritime Transport Union; Christine Dann, from Banks Peninsula, a writer and researcher; Bryan Gould, from Bay of Plenty, a former Waikato University Vice-Chancellor; Joce Jesson, a Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies in Education, University of Auckland and an activist in various community organisations; and Wayne Hope, Associate Professor, Communications Studies, Auckland University of Technology. 

The winner was announced at an event in Wellington on March 11th.

The Judges’ Statement says that they had a tough time picking one out of the three banks which made the finalists but that: “ANZ has succeeded in winning the 2009 Roger Award because the ING funds fiasco is simply and plainly ‘pure greed capitalism’ at its worst”. The Financial Analysis of ANZ adds: “If the ING frozen funds fiasco tells us nothing else, it should tell us loud and clear that the days of regarding bankers as trusted advisers are over”.

Rio Tinto Aluminium was runner up (for the second year running) because of its “blithe disregard of the environment and its massive carbon dioxide emissions” (among other reasons) and Telecom, a finalist for every single year of the Roger Award, was third because it “really excelled itself in providing poor service and treating its customers like rubbish” (among other reasons).

Auckland City Council and its officials won the Accomplice Award for “helping to contract out Auckland’s waste management to Transpacific and therefore acting as a template for future transference of public assets into private hands”.