KEY POINTS:
Owen Glenn, the billionaire who is among Labour's biggest all-time financial sugar daddies, has taught political parties a classic lesson on why they should choose and treat donors wisely.
Glenn deserves applause for exposing New Zealand First leader Winston Peters' confused attempt to bury a $100,000 donation Glenn made to the MP's legal costs.
Peters was odds on to get the high jump from the Foreign Minister role after Glenn produced the evidence which went a good way toward corroborating his claim that Peters has all along been dissembling over the donation.
If Glenn had confined his comments to Parliament's privileges committee, Helen Clark would have wielded her knife by now.
But the billionaire's subsequent suggestion that Labour Party president Mike Williams had used part of his party's $500,000 donation to "shout" 200 Pacific Islanders KFC to vote at the 2005 election went too far.
Williams would probably have shrugged off Glenn's claim that he was an unmitigated falsifier of veracity for some short-term embarrassment.
But the suggestion that Labour had exchanged KFC for votes is off-the-planet, even for the party which unlawfully raided the taxpayers' purse to the tune of $800,000 to fund its 2005 campaign.
Such an action would put Williams in jail for "treating" voters.
If Glenn could be so far off base in his claims about Labour's president, what then did that say for the veracity of his claims about Peters?
That is the conundrum that Helen Clark has been wrestling with as her advisers pick through the forensic muddle now in front of the privileges committee inquiry to see if there is any chance Peters' credibility can be even vaguely resurrected.
But unfortunately for Clark, Williams may also have created a new - and much more serious - problem for the Government.
It is clear that Glenn is mighty piqued that Peters has not appointed him as honorary consul to Monaco in accordance with his expectations. But what has not become public until this week is the allegation the businessman told Williams he wanted the job for tax reasons.
Williams reportedly said that Glenn believed being honorary consul would give him a diplomatic passport which would enable him to get in and out of the United States to visit family without triggering residency qualifications and therefore his tax status.
"He thought the honorary consul was purely Winston's gift. I said to him, 'Does a diplomatic passport mean you can go in and out as though you don't exist for tax purposes?' and he thought you could," Williams told the Dominion Post.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade is adamant that New Zealand honorary consuls do not qualify for diplomatic passports.
Monaco's consul to New Zealand, National MP Richard Worth, believes Glenn would not have received any extra tax benefits if he had been given the post by the present Government.
There is usually some grey area around such consulships where tax havens are concerned. But it would appear from a letter sent by Glenn to Peters, that was published in the Herald in May, that the businessman was doing all he could to ensure that he did formally qualify for tax residency status in Monaco, thus clearing the way for an appointment.
The underlying reality is that if Williams truly believed that Glenn thought he would acquire a beneficial tax status by being appointed consul, then neither Peters nor Labour should have been considering the prospect in the first place.
If Glenn did say what Williams alleges, it may well be the reason Peters tarried over making the appointment, instead of "getting off his a..." and confirming the position earlier this year as the billionaire had expected.
Such an appointment, coming on top of the at-that-stage secret donation to Peters' failed electoral petition and the public donation to Labour, would have carried a risk that Peters and Clark could be accused by their political opponents of rewarding donors in a cash for honours scenario. This is not small beer.
It was Glenn's outburst on this score which persuaded Clark to publicly snub him at the opening ceremony of the University of Auckland Business School.
Glenn still feels the hurt.
But he also carries some responsibility for letting a sense of entitlement get in the way of good judgment.
In Williams' case, he may well have embellished Glenn's comments out of a desire for utu. Instead his verbal incontinence simply kept the deadly game of counter-allegations and half-truths going when prudence dictates it should have been put to bed.
No wonder Clark brought forward the election date naming. The PM will be hoping much of the Peters coverage will be swept to one side as the parties kick into election mode.
Unfortunately for Clark it will be a long time before the Peters' shenanigans are lost in the annals of voter amnesia.
