High on the hog at Wintec

Three years ago we asked Wintec CEO Mark Flowers for an interview. That’s a pretty simple request of a man who earns over $400,000 from the taxpayers’ purse. Mr Flowers agreed but quickly reneged and directed us instead to his well-heeled lawyers, Bell Gully, of Auckland.

So we stood outside his office at Wintec and asked again for an interview, but our reporter was escorted off campus by security guards. The next morning, undeterred, she waited in the car park for Mr Flowers to arrive at work.

But in the weak light of dawn he spied Florence Kerr, slammed his SUV into reverse, cranked the radio up and stomped on the gas. In a farcical interlude some hours later, a Wintec PR apparatchik emailed Kerr to confirm that Mr Flowers did not hear her questions.

Next we visited his house but, instead of talking to us, he posted a sentry to guard his home, lest a journalist knock on his door with questions about how he and some of his senior exec spent our money on overseas trips.

Yesterday – the long awaited Audit NZ report into spending at Wintec on overseas trips, gifts and redundancy and severance payouts – landed. Unfortunately Mr Flowers was unable to make himself available to the auditors due to ill health but, regardless, they issued a damning and unequivocal report best summarised by this sentence: ‘‘In many cases Wintec has been unable to provide an account of how it has spent public money. This is unacceptable for a public entity charged with the stewardship of public resources.’’

The 27-page report makes for alarming reading with staff signing off expenses written in Mandarin, inadequate documentation, and generally a complete lack of transparency about who was spending how much and on what.

The situation is so opaque that the auditors say it is impossible to tally up how much public money was spent and whether that expenditure was legitimate and reasonable.

Among other things, we wanted to ask Mr Flowers what approximately $800, spent over four consecutive nights, paid for while he was staying at a hotel in China.

The amounts were over $200 per night and the times listed on the hotel invoice start after 2am and end shortly before dawn. It’s a funny time for laundry service.

Yesterday, after news of the report broke, we received a call in the newsroom from a grateful Wintec staffer who thanked us for our tenacious coverage of the tawdry affair. The caller said the Wintec Council furnished staff with a sanitised version of events so staff were eagerly awaiting – and not disappointed – when the

Waikato Times’ story was published. And that, too, begs a question. What was the council doing while Mr Flowers and his execs enjoyed 10 years on the ran-tan in Asia on the taxpayers’ dime?

We started this investigation with an Official Information Act request into spending in Hong Kong and China. But what of the Middle East and the trips to Spain? How much was spent there? The answer is that we will never know and the costs will never be recovered.

What is now abundantly clear is that the institution that wilfully protected its CEO, dragged the chain when complying with OIA requests and generally obstructed our investigation thought nothing of spending your money to drag this thing out. Last count it was over $500,000. That much we do know.