Justice Minister Judith Collins has been put on notice by Prime Minister John Key that another blunder, on top of her admission yesterday she failed to disclose key details of a trip to China, could end her career.
After a week facing claims of a conflict of interest over her visit to her friend Stone Shi's company Oravida in Shanghai during the visit last year, Ms Collins was yesterday forced to admit she met with Mr Shi two further times on the trip. She also admitted she was wrong to keep that information from the Prime Minister and the public.
One of those two further meetings was a dinner in Beijing where a senior Chinese border control official and another friend, Oravida managing director Julia Xu, were also in attendance. That further fuelled perceptions of a conflict of interest given Mr Shi's company exports milk and seafood to China.
She said it was a private dinner but that in hindsight she should have treated it as part of the official business of the trip, and ensured it was disclosed in a Cabinet report on the trip. However, she maintained there was no conflict of interest in her meetings with Mr Shi or visit to Oravida, nor was there any advantage to the company from her attendance at the dinner.
But Mr Key, who only learned of the dinner on Tuesday night, said Ms Collins "had a responsibility to reveal all of the meetings that she held in Beijing, even if one of them was a private meeting, and she certainly should have made me aware of that".
