Today in Wellington, Jacinda Ardern talked about what Labour will do in their first 100 days if they win the election. Source: Facebook / @NZLabourParty
National candidate Chris Bishop has denied any link with the man accused of being behind a Twitter account sending anti-Labour tweets and claiming to be the Valley Chamber of Commerce.
The latest came last night, deriding Labour Party leader Jacinda Ardern as inexperienced and with no policies.
The real Chamber of Commerce has today filed a complaint with police about it.
Hutt South MP and Labour party member Trevor Mallard has speculated about the identity of the man behind the post, and linked him to Bishop.
Bishop said the man is a Lower Hutt businessman he has met "once or twice at business functions", but that is all.
"I was as appalled by the tweet that came out from the chamber account as anyone.
"When I saw it last night when I was scrolling through my feed, I took a screenshot of it and sent a txt to the CEO at 7.15 last night and said you should take it down, it's inappropriate.
"I certainly don't know him and I wish he hadn't done what he did," Bishop said.
The Hutt Valley Chamber of Commerce says it is a "victim" of someone it knows posting rogue tweets from a bogus account.
Chamber CEO Mark Futter claimed the group was not resonsible for a fiercely disparaging tweet about Labour Party leader Jacinda Ardern deriding her as inexperienced and with "no policies".
"No person in their right mind would post such material, and no reasonable person would believe we did," Futter wrote.
"We have been the victim of a malicious trouble-maker who is known to us, but is not part of our organisation."
The business group is laying a complaint with police after the tweet was posted from what it says was a fake Twitter account.
The tweet, from an account posing as the chamber's, said Ardern would destroy primary producers.
Futter said the account, which has been running since April 2016, had nothing to do with the group but had been set up by someone with "an axe to grind".
"We've been breached," he said. "We've identified who's done it and how it's happened, so some of our settings were updated and changed overnight including the removal of a link to our chamber website.
"Unfortunately, it's a former service provider to the chamber, and obviously that relationship didn't end terribly well, so the individual's got a little bit of an axe to grind and is causing us a little bit of reputational damage along the way."
If the account the tweet came from is fake, is the website fake too, he asked.
"I don't know who is behind it. But what I do know is that the Twitter page is linked to their official website and it's been running for a good 18 months.
"So either it's someone who has gone rogue or maybe it's been hacked, but I would've thought that the Chamber would've done something sooner, given that this page has been tweeting some pretty derogatory stuff for quite a while now."
He has uploaded a short video showing himself navigating the website and clicking on the Twitter icon at the top, which then takes him to the account where the disparaging tweet is still visible this morning.
The fake tweet that has led to angry comments on Twitter the past two days. Image / Twitter
"There's no doubt that it's linked to their official account.
"At some stage, it's clearly been their account. Either they've neglected to do something, if it's been hacked or whatever the case is.
"What I find strange about it is that while there's a whole bunch of derogatory tweets, there is also official Chamber tweets mixed in there as well. So it seems a bit strange."
Barry said the controversy put the Hutt's reputation at risk and all the good things that were being done there.
