Financial Review Debate — Crown Law Office

I wish to raise the Attorney-General’s role, and the role of the Crown Law Office, in supervising charities. The Attorney-General has a duty to pursue corrupt charities. There are powers that are statutory, conferred by section 58 of the Charitable Trusts Act, but the Attorney-General’s role in supervising charities is a lot older than section 58. I will read from a leading case, which I am sure the Attorney-General has had reason to look at very recently—in fact, it is a case that she would have looked at in relation to the seabed and foreshore debacle. In that Privy Council decision the judges said: “It is the province of the Crown as parens patriae to enforce the execution of charitable trusts, and it has always been recognised as the duty of the law officers of the Crown to intervene for the purpose of protecting charities and affording advice and assistance to the Court in the administration of charitable trusts.”

I have a list of trusts that have been notorious in this country over the last 2 years. The trustees have patently abused their powers and they have not acted in accordance with the trusts. Some of them may have been criminal, but most of them probably have not, or, if they have been, the police have decided they have better things to do than to pursue the trustees’ criminality. But they are all cases in which this country would have been very much comforted to know that we had an Attorney-General supervising a Crown Law Office that was doing the duty of looking after charities.

There is a pattern in this Government of turning a Nelsonian blind eye to corruption. It is a pattern that we have seen, for example, when Dr Ross Armstrong got away with, perhaps, $140,000 that no one could explain. The recovery sought was a fraction—less than a tenth or a fifteenth—of that amount. A previous Minister in the chair saw Don Sollitt get away with sums for his private businesses and watched the board of that company look to recover only $7,000.

We have our own Minister in the chair at the moment, the Hon Margaret Wilson, who has taken a similar attitude to corrupt trusts. I am not aware of a single dollar that this Minister has pursued where the people in charge of trusts were effectively thieves. The message being sent by this Government, and by the Minister’s absolute inactivity in this area, is for fraudsters to use charitable trusts as the vehicles for their fraud.

In effect, by doing nothing the Minister is giving a Government message that we do not care if people abuse trusts. The Government is saying to fraudsters that it does not care if trusts steal or misuse assets from a named charity that are given for proper purposes. They can be confident that the Minister will do nothing.

Let me look at a couple of the examples from my list. People will remember less than a year ago the controversy about Te Hauora o te Tai Tokerau—commonly known as “THOTT”—in Northland. It was a trust set up for Māori health purposes where the chief executive, Jolene Grace, and the chairman of the trust, Luana Murray, at a time when the trust was failing after having used millions of dollars in money intended for Māori health, took off with family members on overseas travel—$23,000 on an overseas trip. When the auditors looked into it they found that something called Westpap Investments had taken $100,000, and it apparently disappeared—or perhaps $45,000 came back, so the trustee said, but no one ever found out. A set of gym equipment that would make the eyes water, that would make half the people listening to this debate salivate, and that was worth $20,000, was bought from a son, and the Attorney-General did nothing.

Report noted.

New Zealand Police