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Simon Burnett
THE BOOKS
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BLUNDER
How ANZ and ING squandered 800 million dollars in a Wall Street casino - and ignited a revolt of small-time investors
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ISBN 9781718005198
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“One of the biggest rip-offs in NZ history”--industry insider (identity known to the author)
“A salutary reminder of how financial services firms can mis-sell unsuitable products to retail investors”--Gareth Vaughan, interest.co.nz
“A shocking story that deserves to be widely known”--author, ecologist and film-maker Christine Dann
“I commend this book to you as a good background on what you can expect if you do not do your homework”--financial commentator and economist Gareth Morgan
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“A fine piece of investigative journalism”--best-selling author Nicky Hager
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“ING were so easily stitched up. I could forgive them but it was the spin, bluster and bullshit that followed while they tried to get retail investors to pay for their incompetence. That is unforgivable”--Auckland asset management firm director Norman Stacey
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"Too few of the episodes in our economic and financial history are well-documented and if this book makes some contribution to such a literature, I welcome it."--Michael Reddell, Croaking Cassandra
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"Blunder . . . describes ANZ’s mis-selling of high risk funds to conservative bank customers, followed by its efforts to distance itself from their subsequent losses . . . what should concern us here is the bank’s response to the findings of deceit--it blamed individual rogue staff, not its own systems. It’s possible a bank could be afflicted by individual staffers who take pleasure in misleading others but it’s far more likely the bank staff were doing what they’d been told – and paid – to do."--Tim Hunter, National Business Review
"This author should get a knighthood for exposing how a bank in New Zealand was able to totally rip people off!"--Verified Amazon purchaser
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GHOST STRASSE
ISBN 1-55164-290-5 (Paperback)
ISBN 1-55164-291-3 (Hardcover)​
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"(Ghost Strasse) is a great read . . . the author seems totally fair and balanced, and he confirms much of what I have observed in the former East Germany"--Graeme Mount, Professor of History, Laurentian University, Ontario, Canada
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"Burnett’s style is especially successful in conveying that the fall of the Wall was not a faceless historical event, rather a point of history which would have been unimaginable without all the human beings, who, willingly or unwillingly, took part in the events leading towards the collapse of the communist regime. . . Burnett draws on a number of personal interviews he conducted with several political prisoners who were held and tortured at the Hohenschönhausen prison in East Berlin. In his narrative Burnett often incorporates excerpts from these interviews in such a way as to successfully give a voice to common people who suffered under communism."--Teodora Atanasova, Georgetown University Washington
THE WALL THROUGH MY HEART
Sigrid Paul
Foreword and translation from the German by Simon Burnett
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Sigrid Paul's story, set in the shadows of cold-war Berlin, is a harrowing chronicle of one family's tragic struggle against East Germany's desk-bound tyrants, its Stasi secret police thugs and its institutionalized stupidity.