Glenn 'scandal' doesn't stack up

By PETER WILSON

Why would a billionaire who lives in Monaco want to come back and be a Labour Party backbencher, even if he had been told he might one day be lucky enough to become the minister of transport?

That's just one of the bizarre issues in the increasingly unsustainable row the National Party is stoking up over Owen Glenn.

It started when Mr Glenn, who has previously given Labour hundreds of thousands of dollars to help it fight election campaigns, said Prime Minister Helen Clark once told him he would "a sitter" for the transport portfolio.

This week he denied he had ever been offered the job and said he wasn't going to make any further comment.

Then he told the New Zealand Herald newspaper he was in line to be New Zealand's honorary consul in Monaco, which turned out to be a far from certain appointment.

Mr Glenn first met Miss Clark when she was dressed as a paua at a wearable arts parade. He gave her his business card and said he wanted to help the Labour Party.

She gave the card to Mike Williams, the Labour Party president, who lost it. When he asked the prime minister who had given it to her, she couldn't remember.

She says might have met him once since then at a dinner.

Miss Clark is way too smart to make an off the cuff offer of a cabinet post to anyone, especially someone outside Parliament who doesn't even live in the country.

And Labour doesn't work that way. It doesn't pick hot shots for its candidate list. National does that.

Something else that doesn't stack up is Mr Glenn's explanation that he gave Labour $500,000 because he wanted to even the score with the Exclusive Brethren.

But the donation was made well before the 2005 election campaign, and no one knew about the Exclusive Brethren's activities until halfway through it.

After the election, when Labour was scrounging around to collect the money it had to pay back for the pledge card, Mr Glenn gave it a $100,000 interest-free loan, which was paid back.

Mr Williams blundered his way through questions about this, appearing to be uncertain whether the foregone interest should have been declared as a donation under electoral law.

He had previously denied Mr Glenn made any donations after the 2005 election, which gave National the chance to claim he had been misleading.

In December, Mr Glenn was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year honours.

It was for his success as an international businessman and the millions of dollars he gave to Auckland University for its business school.

National has put all these things together and decided it looks "very murky" in the words of party leader John Key.

One of his MPs, Maurice Williamson, even used the word "corruption".

That really annoyed the Government, which issued an angry rejection.

The loan is in the Labour Party's audited accounts, there isn't a cover-up.

National says a "rates mate" loan is the same as a donation, which it isn't because it was paid back.

At worst, Williams has made a mistake about declaration of foregone interest. He says he was advised the amount was too small to matter. The Owen Glenn Fiasco isn't a scandal, and National probably knows that. But it is doing a good job pretending Labour is immersed in another unsavoury situation.

That is how it might look to someone who hasn't been following the parliamentary antics very closely, and for that reason it isn't doing the Government any good at all.

Owen Glenn probably couldn't care less.

 

- NZPA