Horan adds fresh Peters’ claim

MP Brendan Horan continues to push his case against his former leader Winston Peters' parliamentary transparency by making fresh allegations over having taxpayer-funded staff working on party business.

Tauranga Independent MP Brendan Horan.

The allegations follow last week's claims made by Brendan that NZ First used $20,000 of its party's leader's budget to fund the Vanguard computer system to use for campaigning and fundraising.

Speaker David Carter is currently investigating these claims.

Parliament's rules forbid the use of funding intended to support MPs and political leaders' parliamentary activities for party political activities.

Under parliamentary privilege, Brendan produced internal NZ First documents outlining his former party's move to raise funds via a regular direct debit facility for members.

He alleges on July 5, 2013, the party launched a scheme to solve two ‘big problems' with director of operations saying in a memo 'these [two main issues] are: poor party financial structure and organisations and inadequate funds to support the party to run a campaign”.

The direct debit scheme was to collect regular payments of $3 per month from members – raising $250,000 during a three-year cycle based on its 3000-strong membership.

Brendan believes the NZ First 2013 board minutes show the scheme was being run from Parliament by the party's director of operations Apirana Dawson, whose salary is paid by Parliamentary Service.

'The leader of NZ First is great at asking for transparency and accountability from others but very poor at demonstrating these standards himself,” says Brendan.

'This could be cleared up immediately by him opening up his leader's fund to the scrutiny of the Speaker first and then to the public of NZ.”

Brendan says Winston and the party need to show that no parliamentary monies have been spent on raising votes or funds.

He adds it needs to be seen that no parliament funding has been paid to Lone Star Market Research Limited, a company Apirana is the director of.

1 comment

yummy

Posted on 28-05-2014 18:46 | By grasser

Dog eat dog!


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