Tremain Chris: Trustees Executors Limited Amendment Bill — Second Reading Procedure Third Reading 
Tremain Chris: Trustees Executors Limited Amendment Bill — Second Reading Procedure Third Reading 
[Volume:632;Page:4011] 
CHRIS TREMAIN (National—Napier) 
: 
 I rise to speak to the Trustees Executors Limited Amendment Bill and firstly to congratulate the Commerce Committee under the leadership of Katherine Rich on the way it proceeded with that bill. I think we worked well together and got through it very quickly and in due course. 
The purpose of the bill is to expressly authorise Trustees Executors Limited to transact business with its current parent company Sheffield Investments Inc. (NZ) Holdings Ltd whose name has changed to Sterling Grace (NZ) Limited and with the parent company’s subsidiaries. It also introduces as Marian Hobbs said a regulation-making power that authorises the Governor-General to amend by Order in Council the schedule to the principal Act by adding amending or deleting the name of a body corporate that is a holding company of Trustees Executors Ltd. 
In looking at Trustees Executors Ltd and given the proposed change to the Act which will require less scrutiny in the future the select committee did have to go through a scrutiny process in relation to the company in this particular case. So for the benefit of the House I will go through a little bit of what Trustees Executors Ltd actually does. There is some confusion I imagine for those of the listening public too as to what it does and how it got there. 
Trustees Executors Ltd is a provider of specialist investment administration services. It provides a whole range of outsourced services to financial institutions charities pension schemes investment managers and managed fund providers. The custody and investment accounting teams hold more than $20 billion of client assets so the company is significant. Some of the other services it provides include custody and settlement reporting trade capture and settlement safe keeping cash management corporate actions portfolio valuation financial reporting and unit pricing. 
Trustees Executors Ltd is an interesting company in its very own right. In fact it was first established back in 1881. Back in the 1880s it was the practice of people to appoint friends or acquaintances as their trustees when they drew up a will or a trust deed and often the most able business people were used in that instance. But in 1881 a prominent Dunedin businessman looked to Australia and decided to adopt the concept of a trustee company so Trustees Executors Ltd was born known then as the Trustees Executors and Agency Co. of New Zealand (Ltd). In 1882 a private Act of Parliament was passed enabling that company to become a statutory trust company. 
 In the early 1980s Trustees Executors Ltd was acquired by the National Insurance Company of New Zealand Ltd. In 1988 along with that company Trustees Executors became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Government Life Insurance Corporation Ltd which became the Tower Corporation. One can look back at the number of changes that have happened in the last 100 years and see that there have not been many. So the arguments that have been put forward by the Commerce Committee about enabling changes in the future to be handled by Orders in Council make some sense. 
In 2002 Trustees Executors started trading as the TOWER Trust Ltd but in 2003 TOWER Trust was purchased by Sterling Grace Corporation which is a US-based private investment company. That purchase prompted a return to the name of Trustees Executors Ltd. Interestingly in 2006 the company will be 125 years old—the oldest trustee company in the country. 
Let us deal with the current ownership change. The current Act defines Trustees Executors’ parent company as being TOWER Trust Ltd. However TOWER Trust sold Trustees Executors to Sterling Grace and that has brought about the necessity for the current bill. 
I want briefly to touch on the fact that the bill will add a schedule to the Act that lists the authorised parent companies of Trustees Executors Ltd but the name of the company’s present parent company Sterling Grace (NZ) Ltd is the only name set out in the new schedule. So the bill as I said earlier provides the ability for the Governor-General by Order in Council to amend that schedule by adding to it the name of a body corporate which means a name listed in the schedule—that is a holding company or Trustees Executors Ltd—or removing a name from it. In future that will make it a lot easier to change the name of the company. 
A concern was raised—by only one submitter to be honest—that allowing a name change by an Order in Council would not provide the parliamentary scrutiny that we might like in the future. On that point it was interesting to note that in my own electorate back in Napier and Hawke’s Bay a situation arose between Trustees Executors Ltd and the Wine Country Credit Union. The Wine Country Credit Union was attached as a trustee to Trustees Executors Ltd and the credit union had significant issues with the company in trying to get out of that relationship. In fact it had a relationship with Trustees Executors Ltd that ended up being somewhat dysfunctional and over a 3-year period when it tried to get out of that relationship it continually came up against a brick wall from Trustees Executors Ltd in allowing it to do so. I have an 18-page letter here from the Wine Country Credit Union that was written to John Grace of the Sterling Grace Corporation which goes into all sorts of detail regarding its issues with Trustees Executors Ltd. Principally Trustees Executors Ltd had had an agreement with the Wine Country Credit Union that said it could not change its trustee company. From the point of view of the Wine Country Credit Union that situation was somewhat insane because it was unable to go out and look at other trustees—like Perpetual Trust Ltd—to see whether it could get better fees or better management of its trust. That situation to me was a concern. 
So I have to say that when I sat in the Commerce Committee and considered whether Parliament should continue to have the scrutiny of those types of organisations or whether we should allow amendments to be enacted by an Order in Council I was somewhat concerned and took some convincing that the latter should be the case. However the officials did a good job of convincing me of that. Given the regular number of changes that those organisations go through it was appropriate that we moved on with the matter and went to an Order in Council situation. 
In summary the bill allows the name of the Act to be changed and we see that clearly. It allows Trustees Executors Ltd to transact business with its parent company. We note that the bill removes the ability of Parliament to scrutinise any future company name changes although there are underlying methods of doing that through Orders in Council and through the officials at the Ministry of Economic Development. As I said I am assured that the process is robust enough to ensure that that scrutiny will happen in the future. So the National Party is supporting this particular bill and we are pleased to do so.