Private eyes 'spied' on the black boat

By JAMES GARDINER

Team New Zealand heads say private detectives were hired to spy on them during the Louis Vuitton challenger series and the America's Cup finals.

Private security staff hired by Team NZ itself at one point confronted another private detective, according to syndicate executive director Alan Sefton.

Mr Sefton said the private eye was known to the staff of Onix International, the company the syndicate had used for its own security.

The man told the Onix staff his brief from a California-based private detective agency was to find out as much information as he could about Team New Zealand - to access files and records. He would not identify the Californian firm or its client.

Mr Sefton said it was shades of what happened in San Diego in 1992 when the New Zealand syndicate learned private eyes had combed their rubbish to find information about team operations and strategy. In the same regatta espionage was also conducted below the waterline, with divers and mini-submarines spotted around the syndicates and their yachts.

The allegations by Mr Sefton last night followed publication in yesterday's National Business Review of a transcript of an apparently private conversation between Mr Sefton, Sir Peter Blake and the corporate affairs manager for Wilson & Horton, Fran O'Sullivan.

The conversation centred on whether the Herald would publish a column by multimillionaire US yachtie Bill Koch. The column, one of several supplied to the Herald by Mr Koch during the Cup regattas, makes allegations about the finances of Team NZ and AC2000, the company responsible for staging the finals. In a statement, Mr Sefton described the column as scurrilous and inaccurate.

The Herald's editor, Stephen Davis, said the original column was not published because it contained unsubstantiated allegations. The paper is checking the points raised by Mr Koch, who was the skipper of America3, which successfully defended the America's Cup in 1992.

Mr Sefton said he believed Mr Koch was behind the latest spying, and the only motivation he could see for such activity was to destabilise the defence of the Cup, for this year and in the future.

The director of corporate communications for Mr Koch, Brad Goldstein, said that was "absurd" and Mr Koch had no reason to undermine Team New Zealand. Mr Goldstein said he would know whether Mr Koch had hired a detective, and he had not.

Mr Sefton would not identify the private eye his security staff had confronted, and said legal advice was being sought over the publication by NBR of a conversation to which it was not supposed to be a party.