He thanks the police for their prompt consideration of the issue.
He asks the State Services Commissioner to conduct an inquiry in order to look at the facts and recommendsteps to prevent such as incident being repeated.
But nowhere is there a mention of having offered his resignation to the Government.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson will present the Budget today. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Nowhere does it contain an apology for having misled the public on Wednesday morning when he suggested that none of the information that made its way into the Opposition's hands could have been accessed by a simple search.
Nowhere was there any statement of regret that Treasury's own systems were so inadequate that it was not alerted to the fact that a perfectly lawful Google search was harvesting confidential Budget material.
Nowhere is there an acknowledgement that he and Grant Robertson, through his own statements, smeared National as potentially criminal hackers.
What is worse is that the Makhlouf statement continues to take a high and mighty tone as though the breach was someone else's failure.
"In my view, there were deliberate, exhaustive and sustained attempts to gain unauthorised access to embargoed data."
He refers to a longstanding convention around Budget confidentiality.
He implies there has somehow been a gentleman's agreement between politicians, media and the Treasury that the Budget should be secret.
National leader Simon Bridges, flanked by deputy leader Paula Bennett, left, and finance spokeswoman Amy Adams, during his press conference, over leaked details of the Budget. Photo / Mark Mitchell
That is complete piffle. It has been the job of every journalist and every Opposition politician to try to find out legally what is in the Budget.
There is no convention. There has been a contrived cone of secrecy around the Budget imposed by Treasury for decades over material, the bulk of which is not market sensitive.
It is simply convenient to release it all at once, and convenient to keep it confidential while all the arguments go on about how the pie should be divided among the competing demands.
Today's Budget lock-up in the Beehive will be Gabriel Makhlouf's last.
