Taranaki tycoon urges countrymen to explore new business frontier

Napier, MSCNewsWire, Friday 13 May 2016  -  The West’s only oligarch Stephen Jennings under the sponsorship of the New Zealand Initiative will address an Auckland forum in July this year.

The Taranaki-born and Massey University educated Jennings is considered to be one of the very few genuine inhabitants of the pantheon of the South Seas nation’s super rich.

He is certainly the West’s only authentic Russian oligarch having arrived there with Credit Suisse, and then set up on his own account.. His Renaissance operation took a roller coaster ride in the aftermath of the old USSR with Mr Jenning’s personal stake considered at its peak to have been touching $5billion.

Now considered to be in the neighbourhood of a more manageable $1 billion, Mr Jennings these days has set his oligarchical sights on African infrastructure.

African infrastructure in recent years has been the focus of Vincent Bollore the French financier whose long arm touched New Zealand taxpayers last year when he gamed Gameloft, a French videogame company underpinned by government stimulus funds.

Mr Jennings, a man of youthful demeanour and front row prop aspect, most definitely deserves pride of place on any New Zealand international social register. In post-Glasnost Moscow Mr Jennings and his former wive Tina became Russia’s first foreign power couple.

Now the former Mrs Jennings is the companion of Lord Lawson, who as Nigel Lawson was the Thatcher-era’s defining chancellor of the exchequer, and who is better known now as the father of Nigella, the television cook.

The Skycity event is a dinner on July 14 and Mr Jennings will set out the case for New Zealand investment in Africa.

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