The chocolate milk that started a social media frenzy in 2014 is continuing to succeed, this time on the international stage. The Lewis Road product in collaboration with Whittaker's has been picked as a country winner for New Zealand by a panel of international judges and will compete in the global finals of the World Tour by SIAL Awards in Paris early April. The release of the chocolate milk in 2014 is widely viewed as one of the best marketing campaigns New Zealand had ever seen after the product's limited availability saw it sell out as fast as it could be unloaded, prompting supermarkets to issue signs limiting the sale of the product to one per customer. Lewis Road Creamery founder Peter Cullinane (pictured) said he was honoured to be representing New Zealand on the global stage. "Our mission has always been, and always will be, to produce world-class dairy products right here in New Zealand and this recognition proves that we are indeed delivering on that promise," he said. Lewis Road will be competing against 27 other country winners for the Supreme Award.
A trust issue
The issue of New Zealand's foreign trusts, brought into headlines this week with the leak of the Panama Papers, isn't all dark gun-runners and Mexican corruption. Our arcane and anonymous structures have also played host to aristocratic family squabbles. A high-profile inheritance dispute between 'Ned', the Earl of Durham, and his five sisters over how their father's estate should be distributed (the will said Ned got the lot) developed a local dimension in 2012 when it was revealed the family's lavish 17th century villa in Tuscany - rented out for £35,000 a week - was stashed in a New Zealand trust set up by local lawyer Geoffrey Cone. Ned boasted to Vanity Fair he ran the trust and it would take his sisters 20 years of legal action to unwind it. Two years later the dispute was settled with Earl paying each of his sisters £1.5 million. The settlement proceeds were mostly met with the £3.5 million sale of an piece of erotic artwork of the squabbling siblings' mother painted by Lucian Freud.
What's in a name?
