Air New Zealand Board Appointments

Air New Zealand has appointed Alison Gerry, Claudia Batten and Paul Goulter as directors on the airline’s Board. These appointments will add diverse and highly relevant skill sets to the Board and will be effective from their approval at the 2021 Annual Shareholder Meeting (ASM) later this year.

Chairman Dame Therese Walsh said the appointments would provide further digital, strategic and employment relations expertise to support Air New Zealand’s Revive phase and to support management’s objectives of prioritising people and customers and investing in digital solutions that empower customers.

“Alison Gerry is currently a director at ANZ Bank New Zealand, Infratil Limited, is the founding Chair of Sharesies and is a director at Suncorp New Zealand. The airline will benefit from her extensive experience in governance, capital management and audit and risk with those companies and via previous directorships at Spark, TVNZ, Kiwibank and Queenstown and Wellington Airports,” says Dame Therese.

Alison will take over as Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee from Jan Dawson on her retirement.

“Claudia Batten is the Chair of Serko, a director at Vista Group New Zealand and the digital advisor to the Westpac New Zealand board. We look forward to leveraging Claudia’s experience as a digital entrepreneur in the US, where she co-founded Victor and Spoils, the world’s first advertising agency built on crowd-sourcing principles and one of the founders of gaming advertising network Massive Corporation. She has also been the North American Regional Director for New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and a winner of multiple awards for her work supporting the New Zealand technology sector.

“Paul Goulter is the National Secretary of NZEI Te Riu Roa (NZ’s largest education union) and a director of the Co-operative Bank. Air New Zealand works closely with unions and will benefit from Paul’s experience with unions here and in Australia over the last 40 years, including a period as Secretary of the New Zealand Council for Trade Unions and as General Secretary of Finsec (the financial sector union).”

Dame Therese said the appointments fill the vacancies created by the retirement of long-serving directors Jan Dawson, Rob Jager and Linda Jenkinson, who will leave the Board at the Company’s ASM later this year.

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