Apprentice boss in cash crisis - Terry Serepisos

[Hawkeye77]

I'm not sure why Bob Jones had to go out making those comments about Serepisos, is he just a grumpy old man now?

I'm sure it hasn't always been plain sailing for Jones either.

I can't fault Serepisos for doing The Apprentice, what was wrong with it?, it was much better than a lot of other NZ made TV programs.

I also think it's great what he's done with the Pheonix, and like he said, what exactly has Bob Jones ever done for Wellington?

[eri]

i don't think you can fault bob much

as a straight talker and a talker

i'm sure the media knew who to go to for sound-bite for their story

heck, even if they think he might have said it in passing to the postman they are likely to use it

"he's a funny little man that likes being on tv, nothing wrong with that"

[spurner]

I think he bought a clock for Lambton Quay!

Grumpy? Well he does have a tendency to sue people!

I also think it's great what he's done with the Pheonix, and like he said, what exactly has Bob Jones ever done for Wellington?

[drelly]

I'm not sure why Bob Jones had to go out making those comments about Serepisos, is he just a grumpy old man now?

Bob Jones was born a grumpy old man! He has more petty prejudices than properties. A few I remember...

- facial hair
- people who wear sunglasses on their heads
- people who drink beer from bottles

he's a funny little man that likes being on tv, nothing wrong with that

Can anyone say DRAGONS DEN???

[CJ]

Bob Jones was born a grumpy old man! He has more petty prejudices than properties. A few I remember...

- facial hair
- people who wear sunglasses on their heads
- people who drink beer from bottles

- Cellphones

[drelly]

Bob Jones is good entertainment though. He says whatever he likes and doesn't seem to care about the fallout!

[Bluekiwi]

Bob Jones is good entertainment though. He says whatever he likes and doesn't seem to care about the fallout!

Punching that reporter who hellicoptered in to interview him while he was fly fishing was the funniest thing I have ever seen.

With Bob struggling through the tangled undergrowth to get to the reporter to bash him.

[drelly]

Damn I never saw that! I'm surprised reporters don't get bashed more often. Like the ones trying to interview students (minors) at Te Puke after the teacher was stabbed.

[whitt]

The punch must have been maybe 20 years ago. google it

[spurner]

I think I saw that a very long time ago. About time someone put it on youtube I think!

If you want another laugh, read some of his books - they are all pretty good.

[Winston001]

Bob Jones may not be the most likeable person but so far as I recall he supports NZ Ballet as a charity among others. He is also incredibly intelligent, self-educated and more widely read than most people.

While I don't like the guy personally I do give him kudos for almost single-handedly energising the 1984 elections by creation of the New Zealand Party. It was like a bright light shining through the normal banality of our politics. If we'd had MMP then, Jones party would have held the balance of power.

In that sense Jones has done far more for NZ than a dozen Serepois's. Additionally he stimulated and popularised property investment.

[eri]

interesting reading from

http://www.font.orconhosting.net.nz/clips/bobjones.html

back to clips index

BOB JONES
By Kris Herbert

Businessman Today, June 2004


As an interview, it was a disaster. I spent seven hours with Bob Jones, during which time he ordered six bottles of wine and didn’t answer one of my questions.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Just before our lunch-time interview, he told radio presenter Mike Yardley that he was personally responsible for a recent increase in red wine consumption.

I walked away from an afternoon with Bob Jones with my head spinning, and not just from the wine. I couldn’t tell you when he got his OBE or how he got started in property investment, but I heard stories about him punching out the Czechoslovakian president and making a fortune by sending everyone in England a bill for 12 pounds. He spun yarns about discussing Rastafarianism with Lennox Lewis’s mother and meeting Haile Silassie - twice.

In between these incredible tales, Bob managed to offend everyone within in shouting distance and lambasted passers-by for talking on cell phones or wearing dark glasses.

Bob Jones was in town promoting his latest book, Degrees for Everyone, a fictional tale that gives voice to his very real distaste for the modern state of Universities.

“Massey University in Wellington, for example, has a three-year degree in air hostessing,” he told Yardley.

It takes a lot of confidence to be as politically un-correct as this man and there is no confidence like that of a self-made millionaire.

At 21, Bob Jones was lying in hospital waiting to die. He has Addison’s disease, for which he still takes cortisone tables twice a day.

“I realised I was going to live and so I lay there and I thought: what do I do? What do I do with myself? And for the life of me I couldn’t think what I was going to do and so then I thought, well, shit I need to give myself time to think this through and so I need to make some money.”

Having grown up in a Lower Hutt state house where his father dreamt of making 20 pounds a month, Jones says he had no commercial background or commercial interest.

“I had one pair of shoes, two pairs of underpants at best, one pair of pants. I had nothing. Less than two years later I was a pound millionaire and it was so bloody easy.”

Jones says all anyone has to do to make money is stop and think. Turn off the television and the radio and just think.

“You’ve got to be very analytical and give yourself thinking time. It’s a series of steps. You say: what’s the objective? How to I go about it? What are the impediments? And how do I over come them? And you will always work out the answers to all those questions and then off you go until something goes wrong and then you stop and think again and it’s so bloody easy.”

Ten years ago, Jones was going through a rough time. “I had quite an upheaval in my life and I needed to restore my confidence and I thought: I need to make $100 million. It’d make me feel good.”

He did make $100 million in a short period of time, and insists he did it without any hard work.

“And everyone thinks I’m a genius. I’m not a genius. I’m not a clever person but I’m a very knowledgeable person because I read. And that’s another part of it. You have to be imaginative. Ignorance is rife now. Really rife. To be imaginative, you just have to have a broad frame of reference and an inquiring mind, to ask the question why?”

But even with all this thinking, Jones never worked out what he wanted to do with his life.

“Well, I did actually work out what I wanted to do. I worked out I didn’t want to do anything. The object was to retire at 25. I retired at 23. I gave the business to my staff. They all got rich. And the conclusion I reached was that I never should do any single thing, that to get the most out of life, I would dabble.”

And Dabble he has. In addition to running his multi-million dollar property business, which he says he works only three hours a week on, Jones has been a successful columnist, sports commentator and head of Boxing New Zealand. He once became a ballet director after taking a fancy to one of the dancers. As a radio presenter, Jones holds the record for defending libel writs.

His recreational pastimes include fly fishing, skiing, tennis, golf and sailing. On a recent ski holiday in Colorado, he learned to ice skate.

Jones gave up writing columns and starting writing books because they held more permanence. “The columns just became fish and chip wrapping,” he says. “It’s quite a hard thing to destroy a book. It’s not wasted.”

His satirical, comic writing is done at home. “I’ll start on the second bottle,” he says. In the morning he reads what he’s written the night before. “I’ll say, shit that’s bloody clever but I don’t remember it.”

Jones next writing foray is uncertain. “It’s an esoteric little book that no one will want to read and so people say why bother, and that’s a very good point so I’m thinking about it.”

All Jones’ novels have a commercial base, because he never did get away from a commercial life. Shortly after his young retirement, he says he woke up and realised it was “actually quite fun doing commercial work. I’d made all this money and was now buying buildings and it was bloody fun.”

Jones says his mother often asks him why he needs so many buildings. “And I say I don’t know. It’s bloody childish. It’s a ridiculous childish business and I don’t know why I get a kick out of it but I do.”

His ridiculously childish business, Sir Robert Jones Holdings, has now accumulated around a third of a billion dollars worth of office buildings, mostly in Sydney. At the head office in Wellington, cell phones are banned. Jones believes computers and cell phones are the greatest inefficiency in business.

“Cellphones are a curse,” he says, preferring to have messages taken and returned the old fashioned way. “Somebody’s probably ringing me right now, I’m not there. Does it matter? We’ve got all these stupid computers in the place and I can’t find out from any of them what they’re doing, I say what are you looking at? With all this technology they’re turning into mindless robots.”

As a landlord, Jones takes an unusual approach. “Others shave costs. We spend money on the building.” Tenants have access to free gymnasiums and personal trainers. He’s thinking of employing a full-time doctor to provide free medical treatment and plans to deliver fresh flowers from his 50 acre gardens every Monday.

“Nobody does this sort of thing. We spare no expense but we keep our tenants,” he says.


“A lot of wealthy people are not that bright,” he says. “Intelligence is extremely overrated.” So what do you need? “Passion and the ability to think logically. It really gets down to one thing. It’s all about making money. That’s really what it’s about. Sure you can be passionate about making your yo-yos or providing your service, you know, it’s fun to be passionate too, but the ultimate objective is really making money. So what you have to do is to figure out how you can create a monopoly.”

Of course creating a monopoly isn’t as easy as it used to be.

“Our economy was structured to be without competition because competition was seen as wasteful. In 1984, if you wanted to start a restaurant you had to notify ever restaurateur within a mile and a hearing would take place in front of a tribunal and you had to produce a paper justifying the need for your restaurant.”

Jones says life was easy in the old order. “If you owned a shoe shop 40 years ago, you lived in Fendalton, you were member of a golf club and maybe you even had two cars. Today, the man that owns the shoe shop is on the bones of his ass and is struggling. Competition does lead to waste but it also leads to the opposite. So the best outcome is to have our sort of system now and be rich and that’s within everybody’s possibility.”

Jones says you can do anything in a small country. To prove it, he once made a bet with friends. “You think of something and I bet you I’m on television as an expert in it within nine months.” Public housing was chosen as the subject, money was laid on the table and sure enough, nine months later, Jones and the Minister of Housing were battling it out in a television interview with Ian Fraser.

“It was so easy.”

In 1983, Jones proved anything is possible again. This time, the country was at stake.

He formed the New Zealand party with the single objective of splitting the conservative vote to keep National out.

“Under MMP I reckon I would have won the thing. Thank God I didn’t,” he says.

“As Lange once said, I was the most successful politician in New Zealand history. ‘He goes to the bloody electorate. Inside two years of forming the part, everything he stood for, which amounted to some unbelievably radical reform, has been carried out and he hasn’t even gone into parliament.’”

Jones says he wanted to change the country and to make it happen he just did the same thing he did when he wanted to make money.

“I just retreated and thought about it.”

Over the years, Jones has made headlines for punching a television reporter and reportedly paying off Auckland financial journalists to write about his company. He’s crass. His swearing was once the subject of a letter from Prime Minister David Lange.

“It said, ‘Dear Bob, over the weekend I was having dinner with my elderly mother and in the course of conversation your name came up. I have to tell you, she was very laudatory about you but she said “it is such a pity he swears when he’s on television. David,” she said, “you’re the prime minister, put a stop to this.” As prime minister of New Zealand and as instructed by my mother I hereby forbid you to swear on television.’”

The outrageous side of Bob Jones is very well know but long-time friend Margaret Clark says he is also extremely kind and loyal. A professor of political science and international relations at Victoria University, Margaret has known Bob for 45 years.

“Five years ago I had surgery for cancer and he had to travel while I was having radiation. He rang me from every place around the globe where he was, outer Mongolia, places where I thought telecommunications didn’t exist. Psychologically, it was very helpful to know he and my other friends were thinking of me.”

Margaret says Bob’s pattern for setting goals and going after them was established from an early age.

“When he was setting out in business, when he was very young, he worked so hard and ate so little that he finished up in hospital.”

At 64, Jones has seen a lot of life. He travels extensively. He’s been married twice and had five or six de facto wives and eight children. At a recent joint birthday party, his oldest turned 38 and his youngest turned one.

With three house staff, Jones says the children are “no inconvenience”.

What keeps him going? “I think it’s very important for older people to go and do radically different things. It does recharge you.”

Speaking of recharging, Jones leans forward to inspect the empty bottle on the table and declares. “Now, we need some more wine!”

[CJ]

ASB helped Serepisos pay his overdue rates
By DAVE BURGESS - The Dominion Post
Last updated 05:00 18/05/2010

ASB bank helped cash-strapped property developer Terry Serepisos pay his rates and ground lease debt owed to Wellington City Council.

The bank stumped up $900,000 of the estimated $2 million owed.

Mr Serepisos said through a spokesman that the council had discussions with ASB, which holds a mortgage over his high-rise office block, about using the Ratings Act to force the bank to pay the rates debt.

Councils can go directly to a debtors' bank for unpaid rates. "It was not an enforced deal by the council. Terry turned it into a loan extension with ASB who advanced him the money against his assets."

Full story:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/3707700/ASB-helped-Serepisos-pay-his-overdue-2m-rates-bill

[Commercial Dan]

I'm not sure why Bob Jones had to go out making those comments about Serepisos, is he just a grumpy old man now?

I'm sure it hasn't always been plain sailing for Jones either.

I can't fault Serepisos for doing The Apprentice, what was wrong with it?, it was much better than a lot of other NZ made TV programs.

I also think it's great what he's done with the Pheonix, and like he said, what exactly has Bob Jones ever done for Wellington?

Hawkeye, Jones ran for govt in 1984 and started the NZ Party which got 13.50% of the entire vote in this country. He captured a lot of National votes and significantly helped the country get rid of Muldoon. Not only that all of his party's policies were 'free market' policies and almost all were implemented by the incoming Labour Government, these policies like opening up competition are freeing up markets have been revolutionery. He also raised almost all of the Women's Refuge's entire starting budget by staging speaches throughout the country then handed all of the money to them; there are plenty of other things he has done particularly in the 70s. He has done a lot for Wellington don't worry about that, anyone who is old enough knows that; he also said in public last week (I was there to witness it) that he never said anything about Serepisos to the paper and they took all of his comments out of context.

Do your homework!

[CJ]

he also said in public last week (I was there to witness it) that he never said anything about Serepisos to the paper and they took all of his comments out of context.

For a man who is not afraid of bringing a defamation action, it is unusual he didn't ask for a retraction/correction.