Now I'm certainly not someone known for being hard on Terry, but if you have to compare him to Phil Whitley to make him look good, that's damning with faint praise indeed.
Not really even comparing, did not intend it to make any comment on relative merits of both men as football club backers, more just cataloguing what I consider the most hilarious episode in the history of backers of NZ football clubs who end up in financial strife (Whitley).
Only comparison would be in relative levels of sanity and that's a very subjective thing....
Maybe because Serepisos is the most prominent of the tiny handful of private owners of sports teams in NZ history (only the Breakers in basketball currently owned by one individual?), there's a bit of the tall poppy syndrome in evidence now the guy's down and out, whereas overseas such situations are a dime a dozen...and barely raise an eyebrow.
There's probably not so much that's funny about Serepisos' problems given that he was at least a legitimate businessman (as far as these kind of speculators can be legit) operating in a more conventional way.