Ewen Macdonald to appear before Parole Board

Ewen Macdonald was jailed for five years after pleading guilty to a number of offences. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The jailed brother-in-law of slain farmer Scott Guy is due to appear before the Parole Board this week.

Ewen Macdonald was acquitted of Guy's murder at a 2012 trial, but was later jailed for five years after pleading guilty to a string of offences committed between December 2006 and January 2009.

His sentence is due to end on April 6, 2016.

Macdonald has been denied prole three times, and his fourth bid at parole is understood to be scheduled for a hearing in Christchurch this week.

NZME News Service sought to cover the hearing but, unlike Macdonald's previous appearances, no media have been granted permission to cover his latest appearance.

The Parole Board said in its most recent decision, in November last year, that Macdonald's "significant personality disturbance" made him an undue risk to the community.

Macdonald was sentenced in September 2012 for a crime spree targeting neighbouring Feilding farms.

He pleaded guilty to six charges, including vandalism of a new house that Scott Guy and and his wife Kylee were building, the slaughter of 19 calves with hammer blows to their heads, the theft and killing of two trophy stags, emptying a neighbour's main milk vat of about 16,000 litres of milk worth tens of thousands of dollars, and burning down a 110-year-old whare.

The charges were not revealed to the murder trial jury, partly because they would have been prejudicial.