The NZ Herald reports that David Cunliffe won't be reprimanded by Clark for his comments to financial news service Bloomberg, which caused a $200m drop in Telecom's sharemarked vallue. While I'm not convinced that he should be stood down pending the result of the Securities Commission investigation, Clark's reasoning for this is somewhat suspect.cx65 free skins

She said that Cunlliffe had no inside information when he made the comments, and so cannot be held responsible for the reaction to them.cx65 free skins

The problem is that as Minister of Communications, David Cunliffe was in a position to have inside information. Those hearing his comments would not know if he was commenting on information in the public domain, or on some other information that he may know (for example, is the Government planning to split Telecom?). It is the perception that is the problem here, rather than did he actually posses inside information.cx65 free skins

Mind you, given Helen Clark's comments about Air New Zealand a number of years ago, I guess she doesn't understand the problem anyway.cx65 free skins

Posted by Dave Bryant at 12:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) cx65 free skins