KEY POINTS:
Owen Glenn, the ex-pat multi-millionaire who bankrolled a largest portion of Labour's campaign last election, says he was only joking when he said Helen Clark offered him the transport portfolio.
He has has just issued a statement through the PR firm Baldwin Boyle after his comments to the Dominion Post last week whipped up a storm.
It says this: "It is unfortunate that some comments I made to a journalist last week have been taken out of context and are now being used as a political football.
"The facts are these. I have not made any donation to the Labour Party since the 2005 election. Following the election I provided a loan to assist the party to look into professional fund raising between elections. It was a loan, not a donation, and has since been repaid.
"I was not offered a cabinet position. My comments on this matter were light-hearted and have been taken out of context.
"I will not be commenting further on this issue."
It is a pity he won't be commenting further.
It is not clear whether he was being light-hearted in a conversation with the Prime Minister over the Transport portfolio or whether he was being light-hearted with the newspaper reporter in question, Kim Ruscoe.
I am willing to believe it was both, actually. Fran O'Sullivan in her Weekend Herald column has probably got the measure of the guy when she wonders if his big-noting might have been a case of the guy wanting to impress by inflating an informal conversation with the PM.
I'm willing to bet that the idea of him as Transport Minister was his, and not Clark's, and that they had a chuckle over it.
As for the loan, David Farrar points out the discrepancy between Labour's denials that it had received another loan from Glenn [he was being asked in the context of Glenn receiving a New year's honour] and the fact that the interest-free component of the loan it did receive is legally classed as a donation.
Mike Williams told me on Friday that the loan was made last year and that it would therefore be declared in Labour's 2007 donations that must be with the Electoral Commission by April 30.
Williams should have declared that loan then and there even if it is not, colloquially speaking a donation. Presumably he didn't because he knew it would look bad.
I don't think it is a federal case that he did not - but Labour deserves to squirm over its relationship with Glenn and the way it tailored the Electoral Finance Bill to suit its own self-serving circumstances. The original cabinet paper on electoral reform banned all donations from overseas sources. The final product banned donations from overseas unless it was from an ex-pat donor.
PS Happy Fifth Birthday No Right Turn.
