Tenon chairman goes with no fuss

By PAM GRAHAM

Sir Dryden Spring has handed over leadership of Tenon's board, acknowledging that Rubicon, the victor of a battle for control, wanted its own man.

"It is perfectly understandable, precisely what you would expect and not something one can have any objection to," said Sir Dryden, a veteran of dairy industry politics.

Former New Zealand Dairy Board chief executive Warren Larson also leaves the Tenon board, which shrinks from six to five people.

"I was not at the board meeting [on Wednesday], but I understand Sir Dryden handled it extremely professionally," said Tony Gibbs of Guinness Peat Group, who takes over as chairman.

"Dryden was difficult to deal with at first, reasonably pompous and strongly opinionated," Bruce Sheppard of the New Zealand Shareholders' Association said of the chairman who cut sound to his microphone more than once at meetings.

Sheppard said the company had moved on the issue of voting US depository receipts and the relationship had improved considerably. Sir Dryden would be missed.

Staying on as a director was "[not what] I wanted to do and not what they wanted to do," said Sir Dryden.

"We did not spend all day talking about the future of Dryden Spring. I told the directors that I wanted to go and then we just got on with the rest of the business."

He said Tenon had a "young management team but a very good one".

"I think that Tenon has good prospects ahead of it," he said.

He said that Fletcher Challenge Forests, as Tenon was formerly known, had been a difficult assignment. Spun out of Fletcher Challenge, it had complex Fletcher structures.

"It had assets with book values which could not be realised," he said.

It had forests, which were valued quite legitimately, but at long run prices below current prices.

"Much of its asset base was very much overstated," Sir Dryden said.

He said the company took hard decisions to align asset values with the market, untangled a web of complex ownership, leases and agreements.

Then it had moved out of owning forests, which had never returned their cost of capital.

The company had gone from being a tree-owner which did a bit of processing to a company focused on customers, marketing and distribution, he said.