Transparency and corruption Tue Toagate, Colagate and now ...Fishinggate!!! With the "fly-in voters", Wine Box, Sheraton, Letters of Guarantee when will Parliament say "enough is enough" and do their job for the Cook Islands people and order a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Corruption in the Cook Islands!!! 16 July 2013 Dear Editor, Last year I wrote to CINews about how I believed minister Teina Bishop was diverting public moneys for his Golden Circle canned Tuna project, without going through the safeguards set out in the Public Moneys Act. My concern was this created opportunity for corruption, which can be a real threat to any attempts to properly manage our fisheries. The minister believed I was accusing him of corruption, (I wasn’t) and invited me to “put up or shut up”. Since then, I have been making enquiries to find out what exactly went on with the Golden Circle tuna label. To help me in my enquiries, I have been using the Official information Act (OIA), an important law passed by the last government. The OIA forces government to be more transparent and is especially important when it comes to preventing corruption. You can write to a department and make a formal request for information. If the information is not provided, you can appeal to the Ombudsman who makes the final decision. The Ombudsman is therefore an important part of the process to guarantee transparency by government. Unfortunately my efforts to obtain information using the OIA have been frustrated by both MMR and the Ombudsman’s office. I will report on this in a separate letter next month, but the important issue is MMR refuses to release information and I don’t know what the Ombudsman does, because he won’t reply to my letters or emails. They really think I will give up and go away? Fortunately, I have been able to get most of the information I requested anyway. I now have further evidence supporting my original concern that MMR are not complying with the Public Moneys Act. I can also see why MMR wants to keep the information secret. It is unbelievable to read what the minister has given away to Luen Thai. The contracts I have reviewed show a complete lack of commercial knowledge by government. My advice to the minister last year to get a senior commercial lawyer to act for government has been ignored. The result is the contracts are so one-sided it is embarrassing for me to read them as a lawyer. However, two of the documents I have seen also show evidence of corruption, and this is the subject I want to review in my letter. The first contract records a sale of the fishing vessel “Bounty”, owned by the minister and his family, to a Luen Thai company, for a sum of cash. It is wrong for a minister of the Crown to do personal business with a company, at the same time the company is applying to the minister for licences and in negotiation for other incentives. The minister is meant to be working at getting the best possible deals for the people of the Cook Islands, not mixing his personal deals with his minister’s responsibilities. In my opinion, this is corruption! The contract also says the fishing licence held by the Bounty will be transferred to Luen Thai. Section 40 of the Marine Resources Act restricts the transfer of licences, because it is important to get the proper information from new owners, and new vessels, as well as to make sure they pay the proper fees. Section 40 (2) says “where a material circumstance of a licenced vessel changes, the licence shall automatically terminate”. The vessel has a new owner, and the licence doesn’t apply to the Bounty anymore, so there has been a very material change. The licence should have terminated, and not been transferred. Section 40 (4) says no licence shall be transferred without approval of the secretary of MMR. I am unable to tell you if the secretary of MMR told the minister “No, the licence has terminated under Section 40 and Luen Thai must apply for a new licence and pay proper fees”, or, if he just rubber stamped the transfer to help the minister get his cash and Luen Thai get their new licence. You see, it’s the same problem again. The minister is mixing up his personal deal, (selling his boat for cash) with his duties as a minister. By getting a transfer of the licence, I suspect Luen Thai saved paying MMR full fees for a new licence. If so, then the minister and Luen Thai have benefitted, but MFEM and the taxpayer lost out. If the minister wanted us to buy his vessel for some government project, he should have gone to MFEM and presented his proposal for why government needs his boat! What he has done is wrong. The contract also talks about the vessel being transferred by Luen Thai to a NGO, or government owned body. Exactly what this means becomes even less clear when you look at the second contract (my copy is unsigned). This contract records the gift of the same fishing vessel back from Luen Thai to something called “Merio Fishing entity”. I have been unable to trace who exactly Merio is (there is no company registered under this name and no bills of sale are deposited with the registry of ships), but I am informed the Bounty has been operated since early 2013 by the minister taking freight for his personal gas business back and forth from Raro to Aitutaki. It doesn’t look good, does it?! I am sure the minister has an explanation for all this. (I have always liked him by the way). Perhaps he is guilty of no more than over enthusiasm, poor judgment, and a blatant conflict of interest? Yet he has always been very quick to announce other donations made by Luen Thai, (such as the computers to schools), so why didn’t he announce this one? Whatever the truth, I go back to my statement at the beginning of this letter. The biggest danger to sustainable management of our fisheries resource is corruption. The only way to protect our fisheries resource against corruption is for government to be scrupulously transparent in its dealings with fishing companies. I hope the minister agrees with me that he and his department fall a long way short of this target. I also hope that what I have seen so far is all there is, and not just the tip of the iceberg! It is not my position to say what needs to be done going forward on the political front, but in my opinion as a lawyer, there are some things needing to be done urgently. Cabinet should instruct Crown Law to appoint a senior commercial lawyer from NZ to examine and review all contracts already entered into with Luen Thai. We have already given away a lot under these contracts, and it is time we got something more than promises in return. Also, if our government is to have any future relationship with Luen Thai, (many people think not!) it needs to be strictly business, and not as “friends”. To make sure this happens, our ministers have to stop kowtowing to Luen Thai and let the Crown Law office handle all future business negotiations with them. Reuben Tylor Vaimaanga Secretary of Marine Resources Ben Ponia responds: Mr Tylor is making serious and false allegations against MMR about its licensing practices and handling of public money. A new license was issued for the fishing vessel “Bounty” when it was sold in 2012, terminating its previous license and Luen Thai is not the holder of this license. As secretary, I have only permitted a license transfer once before, to replace a licensed fishing vessel that sunk at sea. Either way, it is not possible to transfer the two thousand dollar per annum license issued to Bounty to a sixty thousand dollar per annum license issued to a vessel in the Luen Thai fleet because each license depends on certain criteria and these are totally different vessels. The Bounty is a Cook Islands flagged vessel, based locally in Rarotonga, and less than 20 metres length. Luen Thai vessels are foreign flagged vessels, not locally based and less than 40 metres length. The cap on fishing licenses has never been exceeded and there has always been discretion to issue new licenses. In the case of Luen Thai it is a chicken-egg situation because MMR has set targets for onshore processing and offloading but the company claims it requires a certain number of vessels to achieve these milestones. It is public information that currently Luen Thai has fourteen licenses and is requesting an additional six licenses. The minister has shown integrity in keeping the pressure on Luen Thai to deliver first. And despite attempts to undermine our efforts, we are making steady progress to get more value from the licenses we issue. cinews.co.ck
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 13:50:53 +0000
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