BANK OF NEW ZEALAND DIRECTORATE

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 103, 26 January 1924, Page 6

BANK OF NEW ZEALAND DIRECTORATE

TWO CANDIDATES ANNOUNCED MR. A. MACINTOSH DECLINES NOMINATION A good deal of interest is being taken in the election of a shareholders’ director to the Bank of New Zealand, in place of the late Mr. Kane. There will be at least two candidates, viz., Mr. R. W. Gibbs, who recently resigned the office of Government auditor of tlip bank in order to contest the position; and Mr. J. H. Gunson, Mayor of Auckland. Mr. A. Macintosh, who held the positions of Government auditor and later on general manager of the bank for a number of years, was requested by a number of shareholders and prominent citizens to allow himself to be nominated, but declined for reasons set out in the following letter: — “While thanking you for the request you personally made to me some days ago, I regret\to say that having been consulted by one or two gentlemen who stated their intention of becoming candidates for the vacancy to which you referred', and having tendered certain advice without the remotest idea of my own name coming into the matter, I cannot now honburably. enter the lists. I acknowledge heartily the high compliment you have paid me, and I esteem your action all the more because you had in mind, and appreciate, such service as I was at one time in a position to render to the bank. It is true —and 1 hope I shall not be regarded as egotistical in saying so—that I took no inconsiderable part in assisting to restore the fortunes of the Bank of New Zealand, and in securing for it a return of public confidence so necessary to its rehabilitation after the disaster that overtook it, and threatened its very existence in 1894, when, with the prompt aid of the Government of the day, and the process of bleeding to which the then unfortunate shareholders were subjected, the institution was given a new lease of life. In the circumstances it would have sfforded me much pleasure to have felt free to comply with your wishes, more especially as having always before me the very unfair and unmanly efforts made, for political reasons, to oust me from the responsible position I at cne time occupied, a seal; at the board table at your instance would have largely com- ’ pensated for an act of injustice. As the opportunity has presented itself, perhaps it may not he out of place if, in conclusion, I utter what may in some degree be in the nature of a word of warning. The wise man of Scripture has remarked: ‘ln the day of piosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider.’ We are, possibly, all of us, too prone to be extravagantly joyful in the day of prosperity, yet a modicum of prudence and fo (b <>- thought, with an eye to the day of adversity, will help to balance matters. The clouds of adversity are apt to loom up frequently. That was undoubtedly in the minds of legislators in '1894. and had the spirit and the letter of the banking enactments of that year and subsequent periods not I een markedly departed from in various ways, and we had had loss of those long-drawn-out screeds of wearisome platitudes, garnered from d : ctionaries and other sources —instigated by an inordinate tovo of posturing in the limelight—to which for several .vears past wo had become so accustomed, and a little more of that wholesome restraint judiciouslv and with good effect occasionally imposed by hnancial bodies _ to keep venturesome people on the right track, there would have keen in this Dominion a minimum if not an entire absence of those anaemic, unstable concerns now endeavouring to prolong existence with the aid of an indefinitely spun out moratorium and special enabling legislation, and which persistently retard the reconstruction that this country, in common vith many other portions of the world, stands so urgently in need of to-day.—Yours faithfully, A. Macintosh.”