The Sad Stobo Saga

How the wokerati got to a white male

In April 2024 the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) launched its Matangirua strategy – its formal Māori engagement and capability framework. The strategy was designed to help Māori “participate as Māori” in financial markets. That apparently means “not just as generic consumers or investors, but in ways that recognise Māori economic structures, values, and collective ownership models.”

All up that sounds like a separatist model. Are Maori , or those who call themselves Maori, really that different from the rest of us?

About a month later Craig Stobo arrived as the new chairman of the FMA, the body responsible for regulating the country’s financial markets and financial services, including the consumer relations of banks and insurance companies.

DISCLAIMER: I’m acquainted with Craig Stobo. We’re both from Oamaru and went to Waitaki Boys High School, although not at the same time. My father taught him at Oamaru Intermediate School and we lived in the same neighbourhood in Auckland.

Stobo is one of the country’s foremost economic and financial brains. For a time he was CEO of BT Funds Management and later invented the concept of the tax efficient Portfolio Investment Entity or PIE which is now the foundation of Kiwisaver schemes and other managed funds. His contribution to the New Zealand economy cannot be overstated.

With a variety of other experiences in financial markets and in company governance he was therefore a logical appointment to chair the FMA for a five year period from May of 2024.

His Chief Executive at the FMA was Samantha Barrass. She’s 59, was born in Britain, came to live in New Zealand from the age of 7, was educated to graduate level here but went back to Britain in her early twenties and lived there until returning to New Zealand for the FMA job in 2022.

When she came back she told the New Zealand Herald that she was “keen to push forward the regulator’s te ao Māori (the Māori world view) strategy and to make sure it is embedding the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi in what it does.”

So when Craig Stobo spoke as a private citizen to the Justice Select Committee in early 2025 hearing submissions on David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, the legislation that set out to actually define just what were those principles Ms Barass was looking to embed at the FMA, it’s not hard to surmise that she was not best pleased.

There were though some red flags waving before and soon after Craig Stobo was appointed to the role. He refused to have a routine credit check done on him because he maintained he was not an employee and his personal finances were of no concern to the FMA. The Commerce Minister at the time Andrew Bayley let his appointment go ahead anyway.

Then only three months after becoming the FMA Chair he took up a director’s job at a small mortgage company called Indi, a company in direct competition with the banks that the FMA oversees consumer relations for. He disclosed the conflict of interest but took over a year before finally relenting and resigning from that role. He should never have taken the job in the first place.

(Intriguingly he had to resign as a director of fund manager Elevation Capital because it’s subject to FMA regulation. Elevation’s founder Chris Swasbrook is still a director there – and still on the Board of the FMA. Hmm.)

Craig Stobo has made regular media appearances for years. When he took up the FMA position he continued to do so, including with his old Otago University debating team-mate Michael Laws on The Platform.

Being Chair of the FMA is a part time, albeit well paid, job. Stobo wasn’t in it for the money. Having been a fund manager and company director he’s no doubt worth a few million. But when you become Chair of a government body do you lose your ability to speak freely, to express your opinions? Especially if they’re opinions at odds with your CEO and of other board members, the majority of whom were appointed by the previous Labour government.

Board members of Government entities are expected to act in a politically neutral manner. The Code of Conduct for Crown Entity Board Members says “we conduct ourselves in a way that enables us to act effectively under current and future governments.”

It doesn’t say anything about past governments, of which Stobo was highly critical, while praising the current one. (It is accepted though the most recent past government could be the backbone of our ruling class in the not too distant future.)

It seems on the surface that when Stobo became FMA Chair he didn’t change his life routine at all. He accepted another director’s role. He kept talking to Michael Laws. He made speeches where he expressed his opinions.

Is it appropriate that he did so? According to the Code of Conduct that he signed up for, the answer must be no.

But here’s the key question. Did his conflicts of interest and his personal opinions affect his output of work regulating the governance of the FMA? There is precious little evidence to say that it did.

His CEO obviously didn’t like him so somehow inside the FMA she allowed the rumour machine about an inappropriate relationship to become very well oiled. Even where I live I heard some exceedingly unsavoury stuff about Craig Stobo which I didn’t want to believe. Thankfully I now don’t have to.

In the end the Wellington wokerati got him. A combination of other board members who went to the Minister, and the Te Ao Maori pushing English CEO did for him. A (female) KC was hired to investigate. Thankfully she dismissed the rumours of him having a bit on the side with a former FMA staff member but decided his public statements were incompatible with the direction the CEO wanted to take the FMA.

Stobo had been reluctant to take the job in the first place. He agreed because as the KC reports “there was a rush to appoint him due to the delay in identifying a suitable Chair.”

The FMA will be the loser in this. Does it really need to have its Matangirua strategy? Wasn’t it part of the Coalition agreements that such activity was no longer needed in government entities?

Yet it happened under the watch of a National Party Commerce Minister.

A man as experienced in the finance industry as Craig Stobo appeared to be a great fit to Chair our market regulator. In his time there he asked very relevant questions, albeit in a very public manner, about about the work it was doing.

Stobo’s departure will now put extra public scrutiny on the FMA’s performance. That’s no bad thing.