I was writing an article about the Cullen fund and the superannuation age of 65 and why John Key would want to keep it at 65 while the whole country can see the writing on the wall.
While I was doing research for this post I tried to find out who were the financial advisors to this Cullen fund and guess what I found?
They did not need advisors!
They had the “best” advisor right there on their board!
Ira Bing
Meet Ira Bing:
Ira Bing was appointed to the Board of the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation in August 2002. His term of office expires on 31 May 2005.
Ira is an investor with more than a decade of investment banking experience within global
financial institutions, and is a Principal of the Whiterock Group. Before returning to New Zealand in 2002, Ira was most recently a managing director of the investment banking division of WestLB, the European Banking Group.
Prior to joining WestLB in the late 1990s, Ira held senior positions in the capital markets divisions of the London office of Merrill Lynch, one of the world’s largest financial management and advisory companies.
In the early 1990s he worked as a capital markets banker for an investment arm of the Edmond de Rothschild Group, having moved to Europe after a number of years with New Zealand investment bank, Fay Richwhite.
Ira holds a Bachelor of Laws Degree from the University of Auckland, a Master of Laws (Hons) from Victoria
University, Wellington, and a Master of Economics and Laws from Oxford University, England. He is a past
recipient of numerous awards and academic fellowships, including a European Economic Commission (EEC)
Fellowship in the early 1990s, on which he spent time working at EEC headquarters in Brussels. Ira is also a
past Fellow of the not-for-profit Asia 2000 Foundation of New Zealand.
Aotearoa: A Wider Perspective 