KEY POINTS:
Former Serious Fraud Office director David Bradshaw warned scrapping his agency would terminate high-end white-collar criminal investigations and prosecutions in New Zealand.
And a proposal to ditch special SFO powers would "sound the death knell for fraud investigations in New Zealand", Mr Bradshaw wrote to Attorney-General Michael Cullen on August 29 last year.
A series of scathing notes, emails and memos including correspondence between Mr Bradshaw and Dr Cullen, released to NZPA after an appeal to the Ombudsman, show the director felt he was being avoided and ignored as the new model was developed.
Last September the Government said it was establishing a new organised crime agency, subsequently named the Organised and Financial Crime Agency, within the police, which would absorb the SFO.
Officials were asked to look at how the Combined Law Agency Group (Clag) could be improved and look at options including a new agency or retaining the SFO.
On August 29, Mr Bradshaw wrote to Dr Cullen: "The investigation and prosecution of serious and complex white-collar crime is almost certain to become nonexistent if the Serious Fraud Office is subsumed within the Organised Crime Agency."
Mr Bradshaw said most serious and complex fraud was not organised crime and that a paper prepared by the Ministry of Justice and police for ministers was misleading.
Two days earlier in a memo to Dr Cullen - in which he noted the minister refused to meet him - Mr Bradshaw commented on the draft proposal point by point.
He said the proposal set out self-fulfilling prophecies, that Clags were ineffective talkfests, and an argument about a need for a fraud investigation capability in "a globally interconnected world" was "goobledegook".
Mr Bradshaw believed the Government's decision was in reaction to gang violence.
"The real question is why the police aren't simply coping with the problem, if in fact they are so capable and have such fantastic structures already in place?
"The cruel shooting of one baby seems to be the raison d'etre for changing the face of law enforcement in New Zealand. Is there anything really broke?"
In other documents starting from May last year, Mr Bradshaw asked Dr Cullen why the Cabinet was considering papers on organised crime without seeking the SFO's input.
The documents showed Mr Bradshaw was not told of a plan to subsume his office until a couple of weeks before it was announced.
On August 24 Mr Bradshaw jotted down details of a call to then State Services Commissioner Mark Prebble.
"Mark said this had been raised at an earlier meeting of ministers about a week ago but he understood that people felt that they were not to tell the SFO about the proposal."
The same day he wrote requesting a formal inquiry into how the policy paper was prepared.
Another handwritten note with no name given said the decision to change SFO powers was made "high, very high" and Law Commission president Sir Geoffrey Palmer was mentioned. The note said Police Commissioner Howard Broad and his deputy, Rob Pope, "have someone lined up" to direct the new agency.
The Serious Fraud Office (Abolition and Transitional Provisions) Bill is before Parliament's law and order select committee.
- NZPA
