MP wants fishing ministry inquiry

11.45am

Alleged corruption at the former Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries has placed all current Ministry of Fisheries employees under suspicion, National MP David Carter said today.

Mr Carter wants Parliament's primary production committee, which he chairs, to hold an inquiry into allegations a fisheries officer was paid to leave the ministry nine years ago while investigating alleged misreporting of scampi catches.

The payout is believed to be among the largest in the public service. A figure of $1 million is mentioned in an affidavit signed this year by another fisheries officer.

An industry source has put the figure at $100,000 but an independent source told the Herald it was "close to" $1 million. The man's lawyer, Kit Toogood, QC, today denied the payout was $1 million.

Mr Carter told National Radio this morning that the series of allegations "wants tidying up as quickly as possible because, as of this morning, I think every employee at the Ministry of Fisheries is now under suspicion".

"There's an urgency now, I think, for New Zealanders to be assured that there is no corruption within the Ministry of Fisheries."

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) had looked into the matter and reported on it but that report had not been released, Mr Carter said. Both the SFO and the Crown Law Office concluded no action was necessary.

"But we also have the Court of Appeal making a judgment, and that has been in the public arena. The Court of Appeal is super critical of the Ministry of Fisheries officials, saying there are gross inconsistencies with the way the scampi allocation has been allowed," Mr Carter said.

Mr Carter said he would ask the primary production committee to decide on an inquiry when it met later today.

However, it was unlikely one would go ahead, with the Government yesterday saying a third look was not needed.

A spokesman for Fisheries Minister Pete Hodgson said the SFO and the solicitor-general had already looked into the corruption claims.

"(The SFO) didn't investigate, it decided there wasn't enough to merit investigation," he said.

"The solicitor-general engaged a barrister to go through it all -- that report has been done and the chief executive decided there was nothing to merit an investigation. It has been looked at twice."

The ministry this month announced two senior staff had been cleared of allegations of wrongdoing.

Allegations the ministry was corrupt in administering the fisheries management system were wrong, not supported and the reasoning behind them flawed, said ministry chief executive Warwick Tuck.

Former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer told the Herald yesterday the allegations should be further scrutinised.

Sir Geoffrey had seen some of the documents and been a consultant to a party that had made claims against the ministry.

"I felt that either there was incompetence here -- and that's always possible, I regret to say -- or there was something worse that needed to be investigated," he said.

Sir Geoffrey told National Radio today that scampi quotas were still based on unfair individual catch entitlements dating back to the 1991 and 1992 seasons.

Quota reflected who had the biggest share of the catch in those years, he said.

"The unfairness is bedded in and it hasn't been put right, and it needs to be put right," Sir Geoffrey said.

Court of Appeal criticism that ministry officials had dealt with allocations unfairly had not been acted on, when he felt it should have been.

Sir Geoffrey agreed the system was unfair, but stopped short of calling it corrupt.

"But...it does seem to me in that in addition to this mismanagement that is clearly documented in the legal decisions, there are now allegations of impropriety, about why the officials did what they did.

"In that sort of situation doubts arise, and it's important for those doubts to be set to rest.

"This does have a rather bad smell about it, because when the courts make it abundantly clear that wrong decisions have been made, unlawful decisions have been made, and unfair decisions have been made, and yet there is no official move to put that right, questions naturally arise."

Sir Geoffrey said it was hard to know what the SFO and solicitor-general had looked at, as the documentation had not been made public.

In a statement today, Mr Toogood said Mr Nalder denied he accepted a large sum of money in turn for hushing up corruption allegations.

"At the time of his retirement, Mr Nalder received payments consistent with his contractual entitlements and ordinary principles of employment law, and nothing more," Mr Toogood said.

- NZPA, HERALD STAFF

Sir Geoffrey backs probe into fisheries claims

APOLOGY
During 2002 and 2003 the New Zealand Herald published a number of articles regarding allegations made in Parliament and in certain affidavits of corruption within the Ministry of Fisheries and illegal fishing in the scampi fishery. The Herald retracts any suggestion in those articles that Simunovich Fisheries Ltd, Peter Simunovich or Vaughan Wilkinson were guilty of corrupt or illegal activities in relation to their involvement in scampi fishing. The Herald greatly regrets any damage to their reputations and any embarrassment it caused to them and their families and unreservedly apologises to them.