A former group market manager at Open Country Dairy has pleaded guilty to taking secret payments from an overseas customer in exchange for confidential pricing information, and the more uncomfortable detail for New Zealand exporters is not the money. It is that the arrangement ran for more than four years before it was caught.
Simon Stewart pleaded guilty on 15 July 2026 in the Manukau District Court to a representative charge of acceptance of gift by an agent under the Secret Commissions Act 1910. According to the Serious Fraud Office, he received 27 payments totalling $276,668 between 1 April 2019 and 10 October 2023, with individual payments ranging from $6,980 to $22,767. He is due to be sentenced on 15 October 2026.
A buyer running intelligence on the seller
The payer was PT Anta Tirta Kirana, an Indonesian buyer of Open Country’s products. The SFO says the company offered Stewart payments for his ‘kindness’, which in practice meant supplying pricing information and commercial assistance that influenced the buyer’s negotiations against his own employer. When the charges were first laid in August 2025, the SFO described it as providing ‘sensitive price information and assistance’.
That framing matters. This was not a classic embezzlement where an insider skims from the till. It was a foreign buyer quietly funding an intelligence pipeline into the seller, and doing so cheaply. Open Country is not a minor player. It is New Zealand’s second-largest milk processor and, as reported by BusinessDesk, the world’s second-largest exporter of whole milk powder, a global commodity where a day or two of price foresight carries real negotiating value.
Why $276,000 was a bargain
Whole milk powder trades as a commodity, and knowing where the seller will land on price before you sit down is worth far more than the sticker cost of the tip-off. Background analysis from the dairy trade outlet The Bullvine has suggested a short price lead in these markets can be worth thousands per container. Spread across four and a half years of contracts, the sum paid to Stewart plausibly bought a return many times over. From the buyer’s perspective, this was a rounding error with an excellent yield.
That is precisely why the model is dangerous. In concentrated commodity markets where a handful of large buyers move significant volume, the incentive to cultivate an insider is structural, not incidental. The buyer has both the motive and the means, and the exporter often does not know the relationship exists.
Four years is the real problem
To its credit, Open Country ran an internal investigation and referred the matter to the SFO, which acknowledged the company’s cooperation. Self-referral is the right instinct and deserves recognition. But 27 separate payments over more than four years is a long window for a scheme to operate undetected, and it points to the harder question every export business should be asking. What controls sat around access to pricing data, and why did nobody notice a pattern for that long?
The remedies are not exotic. Segregating pricing functions from customer relationship management, auditing who can see price data, monitoring communications with key customers and running independent checks on major buyer relationships are basic information governance. European firms have gone further with analytics that flag suspicious communication patterns. Many New Zealand exporters have never formalised any of it.
The SFO is treating this as a pattern
SFO Director Karen Chang was blunt about the stakes. Dairy is New Zealand’s largest export, she said, and ‘behaviour such as Mr Stewart’s undermines the trust our markets are built on’. She warned that offending which threatens New Zealand’s reputation as a safe place to do business ‘has serious implications for our country as a whole’, and told exporters they should ‘ensure they understood and protected themselves against bribery and corruption risks’.
When the charges were first laid, Chang described this kind of commercial fraud as a strategic area of focus for the SFO. That language has not softened, which tells exporters this prosecution is a signal of enforcement intent rather than a one-off.
The law used is over a century old, which is its own lesson. Commercial bribery in trade relationships is not a new problem, and the tools to punish it have existed for generations. The maximum penalty runs to seven years’ imprisonment and a $200,000 fine. Whether Stewart faces the top of that range will be settled in October. The wider question, of how many similar arrangements are quietly running inside New Zealand’s export sector right now, is one the industry cannot answer, and that uncertainty is the point.
Sources
- 1News: Dairy executive took $276k in secret payments for pricing information (2026-07-15)
- BusinessDesk: Former Open Country Dairy manager pleads guilty for $250k in kickbacks (2026-07-15)
- SFO: Former dairy executive charged over $250K in kickbacks from Indonesian company (2025-08-21)
- The Bullvine: Why the $276K New Zealand Dairy Kickback Scandal Should Matter to Every Producer