KEY POINTS:
The multimillion-dollar Te Arawa Treaty of Waitangi settlement reached last year headed to the High Court yesterday as several Maori groups argued for the transfer of 50,000ha of land to the iwi to be blocked.
The estimated $200 million settlement the Government reached with Rotorua's Te Arawa involved the return of more than 50,000ha of Crown forest land at Kaingaroa as well as $36 million in cash.
Three Maori groups, supported by several others, asked the High Court in Wellington to block the transfer of the land and strike it from the deed of settlement with Te Arawa.
They are also asking for a declaration the Government had breached a contractual undertaking, breached trust, breached a duty of loyalty, trust and confidence to the groups, and breached a statutory duty.
The groups - the New Zealand Maori Council, the Federation of Maori Authorities, and Ngati Tuwharetoa - began the two-day challenge yesterday, which Justice Warwick Gendall said he would decide by June.
They are suing three bodies - the Attorney-General on behalf of the Crown, the trustees of the Crown Forestry Rental Trust, and Te Pumau-tanga o Te Arawa Trust.
Central to the argument was the fact there are other Maori groups with competing claims to the land at Kaingaroa.
For the Maori Council and the Federation of Maori Authorities, Helen Cull, QC, argued the Crown's actions in transferring the land had denied other Waitangi Tribunal claimants the chance to benefit from future profits from rental of the Crown forestry land.
She also argued the Crown had illegally made itself a beneficiary of the Crown Forestry Rental Trust and stood to wrongly receive $61 million in rental profits.
A separate legal challenge to the settlement is under way by nine groups, five of whom say they have competing claims to the land in the settlement, and four who say the body set up to negotiate the settlement had no right to represent them.
- NZPA
