Police to investigate donations
A complaint has been lodged with police over the 2019 return of electoral donations and expenses by Tasman district mayor Tim King.
Former Tasman District Council candidate Richard Johns on Wednesday confirmed he was the complainant.
Johns said his complaint related to 14 anonymous donations, of between $250 and $1000, that King declared after the 2019 election, several of which were listed as bank cheques.
‘‘It’s out of the ordinary, and it should have raised suspicions and should have been investigated three years ago,’’ Johns said.
King denied any wrongdoing. ‘‘I firmly believe I haven’t breached any of the electoral laws and I’ll co-operate with the police inquiry, and I’ll abide by whatever the result is when it comes out.’’
King said he understood anonymous donations under $1500 did not need to be declared.
‘‘Had I been trying to hide the fact that I’d received donations, I just wouldn’t have declared them.’’
King’s position was backed by chief returning officer Warwick Lampp, of electionz.com, who said King was ‘‘not required to declare the donations in question as they are all under the $1500 threshold’’.
‘‘However, I understood he did this as it is best practice to do so and also did not know if there was one or more donors involved so took a precautionary approach.’’
Lampp, who was not the electoral officer in 2019, said when the complaint was raised recently, he put the allegations to King.
‘‘Mayor King assured me that these donations were received anonymously in the mail or placed in his letterbox, and that he had no way to find out who they were from,’’ Lampp said. ‘‘I am required to report complaints to the police under the Local Electoral Act, which I have done.’’
Johns said King ‘‘may well be blameless’’. ‘‘But then the people behind him, the people that did those bank cheques ... [it] may well turn out that there’s one person that’s paid all those bank cheques, it may be two or three people, in which case they have breached the Electoral Act.’’
Johns said he believed bank cheques were traceable. ‘‘There’s quite a big paper trail and if they want to actually do the job, they can trace them back to where they originate from.’’
The issue was raised by a rival mayoral candidate, Aly Cook, at Tapawera on Tuesday evening during a meet-the-candidates gathering.
‘‘After being alerted by members of the public, I have had [electionz.com] confirm in writing to me that a current member of the council is under police investigation for anonymous electoral donations in 2019,’’ Cook told the crowd.
She did not name King.
‘‘However, he is running again and it is the honourable thing for him to be able to address the allegation publicly,’’ Cook said.
King then told the crowd he was the individual to whom Cook referred. ‘‘Yes there is a police investigation. I’m confident I met all the requirements.’’
During a break in the meeting, Cook said she did not know ‘‘much detail’’ about the complaint nor who the complainant was. She raised the matter at a public meeting ‘‘because I felt that it needed to be out in the open’’.
Cook said she looked at King’s return ‘‘and there were a large number of bank cheques for $1000 and some were on the same day and I did actually look at it and I thought, hmmm, because bank cheques are traceable’’.
‘‘Tim obviously feels like he’s done nothing wrong so he was quite happy to stand up and say that.’’
King on Tuesday evening said the police had talked to him but he was not yet sure about the details of the complaint. ‘‘They are waiting for the specifics from the complainant and then they’ll proceed with their inquiry as they are required to do.’’
Johns said he had emailed police on Tuesday evening. ‘‘I was asked to sort of say why I put the complaint and what my concerns were.’’
One of those concerns was that those anonymous donations may have come from people with an interest in the over-budget Waimea dam project.
‘‘My information is that, yes, that’s where it came from,’’ Johns said, adding he had passed on some of that information to police.
Johns has spoken out previously about the dam project. In 2019, when he stood unsuccessfully in the MoutereWaimea ward, Johns said he would push for a judicial review of the project if elected.