Pipi Foundation offers Huata $60,000 bonus

The foundation Donna Awatere Huata defrauded of more than $80,000 has offered the disgraced former MP a $60,000 bonus, saying she should never have been prosecuted.

Despite being nearly bankrupted in the fallout over her offending, the Pipi Foundation has authorised the payment and is now awaiting an invoice from her before handing over the money, the Dominion Post reported today.

The $60,000 bonus was approved by foundation members seven days ago and is for work Mrs Huata did updating the four-minute reading programme two years ago.

The Pipi Foundation says she did not solicit the payment.

Revelations of the $60,000 bonus came yesterday after Mrs Huata and her husband Wi appealed against their conviction and sentence at the Court of Appeal in Wellington.

The Pipi Foundation supplied an affidavit to the court yesterday.

After the hearing spokesman Peter Nee Harland said Mrs Huata had earned the $60,000 -- and if it were up to the foundation, she would never have been prosecuted.

Whether she was guilty of the fraud charges was up to the court to decide, he said.

The foundation, a private trust with five trustees, had agreed on September 28 to the payment "for her input and expertise in improving and enhancing the so-called four-minute reading programme kindly settled by way of gift from her upon this organisation".

Mrs Huata had gifted the reading programme she devised to the foundation and she had estimated the cost of her and a colleague's services at $60,000.

"But the foundation never paid for it, so they felt they should," foundation lawyer David Porteous said.

Mrs Huata was jailed for two years and nine months for perverting the course of justice and defrauding the foundation of $82,409 -- spending some on a stomach-stapling operation and on boarding school fees for two of her children.

The former Act MP spent nine months in prison and less than three months on home detention. Wi Huata was sentenced to two years' jail but bailed to care for the couple's children, pending the outcome of the appeal.

- NZPA