Peters Winston: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumePeters Winston: General Debate[Sitting date: 11 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:7905. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): Everybody is moving to the Wairarapa excepting Alastair Scott the local MP. I went down the main street of Masterton and I asked 10 “Wairarapans”—I said to them: “Who’s your local MP?”. Nine could not tell me and the tenth one was his branch chairman.Will Rogers once said: “I don’t make jokes; I just watch the Government and I report the facts.” And the effective takeover of Silver Fern Farms proves it. We know Silver Fern Farms tried to meet the Minister of Finance months ago but he was too busy to meet with our largest meat exporter. If he will not meet them and if he will not see them what guarantees does Fonterra have in its hour of need? What is for certain is that this supposed bent Chinese deal for Silver Fern Farms needs the sunlight of investigation.The apologists would have us believe that Silver Fern Farms was a financial train wreck but on Monday only 3 weeks after its board recommended a half fire sale to the Chinese Silver Fern Farms announced a 28 percent surge in operating profit to $86 million. This was off the revenues for New Zealand of $2.45 billion. It slashed debt down from $288 million to $120 million and by the end of June next year it will be down to $89 million.The farmers were told they were going to get $261 million because they were led to believe all that by soothing words. They have been conned by a board that should have resigned and by Goldman Sachs questionable legal chicanery. Shanghai Maling this Chinese State-owned enterprise is getting the corporate heist of the century. It is paying only $57 million for half of Silver Fern Farms with $40 million for the shareholders $17 million retained by the co-op and a very fishy $7 million earmarked for future co-op directors’ costs. This smells. There is another name for this and it is called a golden parachute for corporate quislings.And what do the Chinese get in return and why? They get control of everything from Silver Fern Farms’ assets to intellectual property including taxpayer-funded research and development. All of it gets poured into a new company called Silver Fern Farms Ltd. In this company the co-op and Shanghai Maling may have five board seats apiece but Shanghai Maling gets to appoint the chairman and hold the casting vote on matters that deliver complete control of the company to the Chinese Government—things like appointing the chief executive officer setting the budget business planning and the timing and amounts of dividends. All those five things are in the control of the Chinese and that also includes control over the much-touted $261 million meaning it is in reality just an internal transfer of funds from one Chinese Government - controlled agency to another. And if Chinese control affects stock procurement policy leads to plant closures or moves value-added processing to China there is nothing the co-op half owner can do about it.What on earth is provincial National Party MP representation doing? Why nothing. They do not want to know. They just do not want to know. This deal is rotten and a lot of National Party people are saying so and a lot of intelligent farmers are saying so as well. They say: “Oh you’re going to go and supply the Alliance Group.” Oh yes? If there is a price war guess who is going to win? It will not be the Alliance Group.There is also a certain issue about Shanghai Maling’s overseas-person status—something well outlined in the National Business Review by lawyer and Silver Fern Farms supplier David Boswell. When it comes to certain transactions it will need Overseas Investment Office approval telegraphing the fact that Silver Fern Farms is not 100 percent pure New Zealand. Aside from China having a back door into Mr Key’s much-vaunted Trans-Pacific Partnership a deal that US House Republicans now say will not be signed in 2016 our farmers end up exposed to whatever China does domestically and internationally. You could not see a worse deal.We are caught now. Should the Spratly Islands for example or pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong explode we would be finding ourselves in a diplomatic straitjacket typically taken there by somebody from Merrill Lynch who knows nothing about international circumstances or foreign policy for that matter. In any crisis Silver Fern Farms’ profits go to a Chinese State-owned enterprise and it does not sit well with the United States the biggest importer of our beef. But perhaps the biggest concern is the way that the Takeovers Act and the Takeovers Code are being side-stepped almost as expertly as Nehe Milner-Skudder.