Contact Energy stalwart, Liz Kelly, flies the coop

By Pattrick Smellie

July 15 (BusinessDesk) – Contact Energy’s longest-serving senior executive, Development and Acquisitions general manager Liz Kelly, is to leave the company after 11 years in senior roles, starting with the company’s first post-privatisation chief executive, Paul Anthony.

Contact gained its fifth chief executive, Dennis Barnes, earlier this year following the departure of David Baldwin for a senior role at Contact’s majority shareholder, Origin Energy.

Fiercely loyal and formidably commercial, Kelly worked in merchant banking offshore and energy law before starting at Contact as investment relations manager, graduating to the senior management team under Baldwin.

She most recently helped organise Contact’s rights issue to raise $351 million in new capital in a deal that made tongues wag in banking circles after she successfully negotiated away underwriting fees, significantly reducing the cost of the exercise for the country’s largest NZX-listed energy company.

She was also responsible for bringing the Ahuroa gas storage project to fruition, a first of its kind in New Zealand, and was deeply involved in major corporate actions affecting Contact, including the failed 2006 Contact-Origin merger proposal and attempts by the previous cornerstone shareholder, Edison Mission Energy, to take the company over completely.

A company statement said Kelly was “moving on to seek new challenges”, with her responsibilities to be divided between finance and governance teams, and chief financial officer Mark Elliott the designated investor relations contact.

Disclosure: Pattrick Smellie worked at Contact Energy between 2001 and 2008

(BusinessDesk)

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