KEY POINTS:
Often considered the scourge of company boards, the Shareholders Association has received a recommendation from a surprising quarter - Telecom chairman Wayne Boyd.
Boyd has written to Telecom shareholders encouraging them to join the association and enclosing an application form.
"In our view a strong and secure NZSA, with a broad membership spread through the community, is valuable to the functioning of New Zealand's capital markets, and further to the wellbeing of all listed New Zealand companies," Boyd writes in a letter shareholders are expected to receive tomorrow.
He told the Business Herald he wanted to encourage people to be more confident about the sharemarket.
"It's all about making sure that we're getting the range of views from shareholders properly canvassed and I think [the NZSA] are an important conduit in that regard.
"We've got to grow the market and I don't think we'll do that until we get New Zealanders confident that this is an essential choice in the choice of investments for their retirement."
For NZSA chairman Bruce Sheppard the letter represents endorsement for the group he co-founded in 2001.
"It's New Zealand's largest company saying to its shareholders, 'This thing that sits out to the side created by a group of what many had thought were fringe nutters actually does have a role to play ... and it deserves to be supported'."
Relations between Telecom and the NZSA are generally cordial, but they haven't always been.
The two clashed in 2003 over Telecom's bid to appoint former BNZ chief Lyndsay Pyne to the board in 2003. Telecom eventually backed down.
Sheppard - an accountant who used to don an assortment of strange hats for company meetings - says "perhaps over the last couple of years in particular there's been a growing maturity in our approach to things".
So, no more hats with horns?
Never say never, it seems.
"There could be circumstances," says Sheppard, "where a company is just so brain dead stupid and their actions so value destructive and their attitude so darn arrogant and the issue so important that you have to laugh at it in order not to cry."
