Making the case for compulsory supermarket divestments

Making the case for compulsory supermarket divestments
Watch the fur fly when the supermarket competition conference opens later this week. (Image: Getty)
Pattrick Smellie
It would have been around 1972 that my father, then a solicitor, became involved in a scheme so audacious that he made a rare breach of the code of silence surrounding his clients to inform his three sons – aged perhaps 10 and under – of the big secret he was working on.It involved a millionaire Welshman, Albert Gubay, who’d decided to bring competition to New Zealand supermarket shopping by starting a completely new chain of stores, having founded and then sold the Kwik Save supermarket chain in the UK.Dad’s secret miss...

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