Opinion
The Labour Party had its own reasons for digging into old Australian court files that contained evidence taken from John Key by investigators of phony foreign exchange deals involving Elders Merchant Finance in the 1980s.
The Herald had a different interest in the matter.
It was our
extensive profile of Mr Key this year that caused a Labour-affiliated website to question the honesty of his recall of these events and challenged us to correct the record.
When Labour Party president Mike Williams took the extraordinary step of leaving his post in the middle of an election campaign to follow up his suspicions in Melbourne, the Herald's Eugene Bingham, primary author of the Key profile, was not far behind him.
In Melbourne, Mr Williams briefly thought he had found Labour's "neutron bomb" in the shape of a cheque with a signature similar to Mr Key's. Further checks of the court file, including by Bingham, identified the signature as that of somebody else entirely.
But we remained concerned at the discovery that, contrary to Mr Key's statements to us, he had not left Elders before the infamous "H-fee" transactions were done.
He had not left Elders in 1987 as he told us; he was at the company until August 31, 1988. The first of the two H-fee deals was done on January 11 that year, the second on September 7.
Mr Key says he knew nothing of the first deal, which the court documents show was handled in Australia. "I never knew about it because it never went through our books," he said. There is no reason to doubt him on that point.
But why did he tell us he had left Elders a year earlier than he did? The reason may be simply that he has a hazy recall of dates but he needs to be more precise. A would-be Prime Minister must expect scrutiny of every word.
