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Tonga’s Government has sold its 40 per cent stake in the Westpac Bank of Tonga.

The bank has reacquired the shares at an undisclosed price.

Just after midday the Westpac Banking Corporation released a statement saying it has bought the Tongan Government’s share of its operations, and it now has outright ownership of its operations on the island kingdom.

The bank says the acquisition is part of its expansion plans in the Pacific and demonstrates its commitment to the region.

Westpac’s general manager of Pacific banking, Jane Kittel, says it will continue with a long-term strategy to help with recovery of the Tongan economy, including rebuilding investor confidence in the kingdom.

Westpac has been in Tonga since 1974 and across the pacific region employs over 1,100 people.

Dan Lyons, the former Forbes writer and soon-to-be Newsweek writer, announced Wednesday in a rambling post that he’s shutting down the tech industry phenomenon known as The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. After it launched in 2006, the blog quickly became a must-read for anyone intrigued by Apple, its mercurial founder, and Silicon Valley in general.

Lyons played up some of the well-known traits of Jobs and Apple, such as the CEO’s preference for mind-altering substances earlier in his life and the company’s obsession with secrecy, to great comic effect. But he also wrote withering posts about other tech companies and executives from Jobs’ point of view. The anonymous nature of the blog sparked a frantic guessing game as to the author’s identity, which was won by The New York Times in August 2007.

Fake Steve became the main character in a humorous book called Options, but after Lyons was outed the blog seemed to lose some of its immediacy within the tech zeitgeist. Recent guest posts from the likes of Fake Jerry Yang never really generated any buzz, and Lyons’ decision to leave Forbes for Newsweek had already put the future of the blog in question.

Lyons intends to start a new site under his own name in the coming weeks.

Paul Hagy has been promoted by Aon Corporation to serve as the firm’s new corporate treasurer.

He leaves behind his former post of vice president to succeed Diane Aigotti, who parted ways with the firm two months ago.

It was in 2002 that he first joined Aon, then as assistant treasurer, bringing with him experience of treasurer positions with GE Capital, Heller Financial, and Household International.

In his new post Hagy will report directly to chief financial officer and executive vice president Christa Davies.

He will be tasked with the responsibility for managing financial risk and cash, money and capital markets and operational risk management.

Davies has stated that his focus will be upon bolstering financial efficiency and driving growth forward by working alongside the firm’s business leaders and working on capital management.

WELLINGTON (AFP) - New Zealand share prices hit a three-year low on Tuesday, pushed down by worse than expected inflation figures and pressure from offshore markets, dealers said.

The benchmark NZX-50 index lost 1.30 percent, closing off 39.7 points at 3040.45 on turnover worth 291.8 million dollars (221.04 million US).

The market was buffeted by a fall in US stocks overnight as well as fresh domestic data showing the biggest quarterly rise in inflation for 18 years.

Annual inflation is now running at 4.0 percent after most analysts had forecast a figure around 3.8 percent.

Leading stock Telecom accounted for 76 percent of turnover, slipping one cent to 3.31 dollars off an intra-day low of 3.26.

“There’s been fairly big volume through today which would indicate a bit of possible offshore interest,” David Le Breton of ASB Securities said.

Second-ranked Contact Energy slid 26 cents, or 3.5 percent, to 7.14, while Fletcher Building ended 20 cents down at 6.05, ahead of its annual result.

Among other top-10 stocks, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare was down three cents at 2.27, Fisher & Paykel Appliances was flat at 1.95 and Sky City was down six cents at 2.96.

Sky TV rose two cents to 4.17, Auckland Airport fell five cents to 1.85 and Infratil rose a cent to 1.93 dollars.
WELLINGTON (AFP) - New Zealand share prices hit a three-year low on Tuesday, pushed down by worse than expected inflation figures and pressure from offshore markets, dealers said.

The benchmark NZX-50 index lost 1.30 percent, closing off 39.7 points at 3040.45 on turnover worth 291.8 million dollars (221.04 million US).

The market was buffeted by a fall in US stocks overnight as well as fresh domestic data showing the biggest quarterly rise in inflation for 18 years.

Annual inflation is now running at 4.0 percent after most analysts had forecast a figure around 3.8 percent.

Leading stock Telecom accounted for 76 percent of turnover, slipping one cent to 3.31 dollars off an intra-day low of 3.26.

“There’s been fairly big volume through today which would indicate a bit of possible offshore interest,” David Le Breton of ASB Securities said.

Second-ranked Contact Energy slid 26 cents, or 3.5 percent, to 7.14, while Fletcher Building ended 20 cents down at 6.05, ahead of its annual result.

Among other top-10 stocks, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare was down three cents at 2.27, Fisher & Paykel Appliances was flat at 1.95 and Sky City was down six cents at 2.96.

Sky TV rose two cents to 4.17, Auckland Airport fell five cents to 1.85 and Infratil rose a cent to 1.93 dollars.

Global insurer and broker Marsh and its MMC sister firm, Guy Carpenter, have announced that Marsh’s aviation reinsurance team are to migrate to Guy Carpenter.

The move is predicted to be completed before the start of the next calendar year.

In total, 29 Marsh employees are involved in the move.

Guy Carpenter’s chief executive officer, Nick Frankland, described the decision as a positive move for the firm’s customers.

Frankland explained that, through access to Guy Carpenter’s technical and analytical suite, the aviation reinsurance team would be better placed and able to offer a more comprehensive service to clients.

The leader of Marsh’s aviation reinsurance team, Tim Haynes, believes that by joining reinsurance specialist Guy Carpenter they will be able to provide a better experience for the firm’s clientele.

Amit Agarwal from blog Digital Inspiration has a great guest post on the Official Google Docs blog today outlining how anyone can use the service as a live blogging tool. The writing format, which has become an increasingly popular way for bloggers to cover events as they’re happening (mainly useful for things like Apple keynote speeches), but also manages to work for smaller conferences and events, too. Agarwal’s suggestions are to either set it up as a special page on compatible blogging platforms so that your writings will show up like a regular post, or to simply embed it on the page as I’ve done here. One of the platform’s strong suits is that it lets several people work on a document at the same time, which your standard blogging platform likely won’t allow. Other small things to note are that your blogging tool might not pick up your byline or give the post a time stamp. Agarwal suggests you use Google Docs’ inline comment system (hitting CTRL + M), which will add a timed notation. Also, your readers will need to manually refresh the page to see any updates since there’s no way to set your individual post to do that automatically. We’ve covered several live blogging tools on Webware before. Rafe’s favorite is CoverItLive, which we’ve used with great success. There’s also competitor ScribbleLive. Both offer live updating, and options to let your readers get notifications and reminders on when live coverage will begin. Update: While Google Docs works just fine as a live blogging tool, there are some things to note about the embed option that some might consider shortcomings. For one thing it will auto-publish any changes when it auto-saves (something you can turn off, but having it on takes some effort out of the equation). This might be troublesome for some users who are simply jotting down ideas and don’t want them to go live yet. Also, whatever you write might not get picked up so well in your RSS feed, or for mobile readers. The post nearly locked up Safari when viewed on an iPhone. I’ve embedded the original live blog after the break, which is simply the same post as what’s seen above (sans update).