Len Brown appears to have got off scot-free from his nice little rort of the Counties Manukau Pacific Trust billboard. I say appears because if you read the Herald article they say he is in the clear.
The Audit Office has found it was not inappropriate for a charitable trust to allow Auckland Mayor Len Brown free use of its billboard to promote his mayoral campaign.
Except of course that isn’t what the Office of the Auditor-General said at all. They said:
You also told us that there was some debate about the request at the meeting. The trustees resolved to make the billboard available without charge to any mayoral candidate that made an approach for such use. This was subject to the billboard’s availability, and the Trust incurring no cost.
We asked the Trust whether it made this opportunity known to other candidates or their campaign teams as well as Mr Brown’s team. Mr Jeffery told us that the Trust did not formally do so.
Mr Brown was the only candidate to use the billboard, and did so when the billboard was available – which was for about five weeks of the campaign period.
So the Trust has a meeting, decided to allow the use of the billboard to all comers and then didn’t tell anyone about that decision, except for Len Brown who had at least two key members of his campaign team on the board. One of those campaign members and Trust member, Richard Jeffrey, is the same Richard Jeffrey who then went on to get a CCo board placement foisted on the council in secret by Len brown. He is also the same Richard Jeffrey who was in attendance at the now infamous Volare dinner, a dinner that Len Brown tried to keep secret until I went to the Ombudsman to force him to tell us the truth.
All the OAG has found is that the Trust followed a process and that they managed conflict of interest issues. The simple plain fact is that the Trust made a decision and then neglected (on purpose) to make the offer of billboard space to all-comers. That to my mind is still corruption, small scale but corruption nonetheless. The Trust favoured Len Brown’s campaign above all others. The OAG evidence is clear for all those who read it not just the bit about the perceived conflict of interest.
