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Happy Birthday Mr Mayor

by Whaleoil on July 12, 2010

On the weekend the SST published some aspects of the expenses of Leigh Auton, the patsy CEO of Len brown’s Manukau City Council.

This morning a courier package arrived with a copy of the documents for me.

I’ve had a quick go through and noticed something that the SST seems to have missed. It was the date that rung a bell.

Leigh Auton and Len Brown Birthday Lunch

Leigh Auton and Len Brown Birthday Lunch

I thought, now that’s interesting and so flicked through a few more documens and found;

Leigh Auton and Len Brown birthday party?

Leigh Auton and Len Brown birthday party?

Well now, there’s a coincidence. Surely not, two years in a row, a birthday lunch on the 1st of October. Now who could possibly have a birthday on the 1st of October?

What is so galling about these amounts isn’t so much the total, it is the gall of two men who between them pull in over $600,000 per annum and think nothing of charging a birthday shout to the ratepayers. Quite how a birthday shout constitutes council business is beyond me. But then there seems to be a cozy little circle of approval of expenses between Len Brown, Leigh Auton and the Finance Director. They are all scratching each others back.

Flicking through the expenses of Leigh Auton it is astounding that someone on more than $450,000 per annum charges essentially chump change to his council credit card, for things like parking for a couple of hours. Worse still is flagrant disregard for council policy and for the LGOIMA by redacting the details of the expenses. Not even elected officials it seems can get hold of the details of the exact spending. Clearly transparency isn’t something either Len Brown or Leigh Auton believe in.

I wonder perhaps what he thinks his salary is for, because every conceivable expense that can be chalked up to the council is, there is no swings and roundabouts, it is all swings for Len Brown and Leigh Auton as they trough it up on the ratepayers.

There is page after page after page of “entitlements”. The justification for many is pathetic and tenuous at best. Thank the lord that Leigh Auton won’t be getting any job in the new Super City.

Of course I expect Len Brown to announce that Leigh Auton was doing all this “for the love of the people”.

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  • deviant

    The sense of entitlement demonstrated here is overwhelming. I’d rather not have paid for these two twats to go to lunch, if I asked for details I know Len would have told me who had been there and what they’d had…always with limits though.

    Goodbye Leigh, goodbye Len, fuck off for good and do us all a favour.

  • inventory2

    Keep digging Cam. I get the feeling you’re not too far off striking paydirt. It’s high time that these leeches were hung out to dry. As you say, they earn $600k between them, but they expect the ratepayer to feed them. That sucks.

  • johnboy

    They obviously are fans of Donald Trump.

    “The point is that you can’t be too greedy.”

    Donald Trump :)

  • gaskranken

    If lucky lenny was to win the super duper city mayoralty how long do you think it would be before lucky leigh had himself a well paying gig tucked away inside the mayors inner rectum cooking the books?

    Lets get the octopus to pick the super city mayoral race winner eh?

  • spiker

    Keep the light shining on the cockroaches.

  • mediatart

    “charges essen­tially chump change to his coun­cil credit card”
    You obviously didnt read Keys last 2 months of credit card charges. There was a $9 account, improperly reciepted, for Burger King. But he wasnt the only one putting normal lunches on the tax payer. That bottle blond Roy was doing the same and McCully was going to Soul for $150+ lunches ( with his PS). Sure when you are out on officil business, you arent likely to be bringing your sandwiches from home, but as MPs they allready get a no questions asked allowance for this sort of thing.
    The credit card rules for Ministers and PMs are the same official business, lunch with Mayor yes , lunch between meetings no

  • giblet

    One aspect of this affair I am a little sad about is that there are no employees inside the Council with the integrity to blow the whistle on this illegal behaviour. Instead we only hear about from OIA requests from members of the public.

    An identical situation existed with Geoff Chapman in the mid 1990′s. Chapman was Auditor-General (!) and later CEO of ACC and was convicted of numerous frauds, including making cash withdrawls against his Government credit card and hiring $5,000 limosines in America on the taxpayer. During his Court case it emerged that his Secretaries, PA’s and accounts people had concerns about his spending but not one of them reported their concerns to the authorities.

    Nothing much has changed in 15 years – public servants are still too gutless to report criminal offending by their bosses.

  • soberontheshore

    You’re kidding, right, Birthday Party, on Oct 1? Are these people cretings or do they honestly beleive that we, the great unwashed, cannot smell corruption when it is put before us?

    And let’s not kid ourselves, you can call it anything you like, from creative accounting to bad accounting practice, but what it is is CORRUPTION, pure and simple.