The Upper Hutt City Council is spending up to $80,000 on two private detectives to figure out who leaked council papers detailing a failed $1.5 million deal with the Upper Hutt Mall’s owner to The Post.

Council officials called the sum a rough figure and expected the final amount to be “considerably less”. It compared with the $43,000 that the Wellington City Council spent in 2023 for lawyer Linda Clark to run a code of conduct investigation over the Reading Cinema deal, after details about the proposal to buy land under the quake-prone complex were leaked.

Mayor Wayne Guppy said it was “too premature” to comment on the ongoing investigation’s cost and whether he would like to make the final report public, adding he had not been briefed since the investigation began.

“We’ll see where we’re at and what the outcome is,” he said.

Upper Hutt councillors rejected the mall deal in a public-excluded vote last month, which would have had the council provide $1.5m to developer Ganson in exchange for developing three locations and ending litigation over the council’s alleged breaches to an earlier 2015 agreement.

The Post revealed the deal’s contents the evening before the vote. Ganson subsequently abandoned the lawsuit against the council, whose legal bills already totalled close to $300,000.

The council’s general counsel, Rachael Perfect, confirmed in a response to a Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act (LGOIMA) request that two “separate but related” investigations commenced days after the vote, on May 22 and May 30.

“The fees paid will depend upon the number of hours worked by the investigators,” she said. “As the investigation is ongoing we can not predict how much this would be. We don’t anticipate the cost exceeding $80,000 and would expect it to be considerably less.”

One of the private investigators, former police detective Peter Hikaka, had already approached The Post’s reporters requesting a meeting on Wednesday and throughout last week.

Perfect said the detectives were hired “on the recommendations of individuals with knowledge and expertise to make such recommendations”.

The council would not say if the final report would be made public and refused to provide copies of the investigation’s formal terms of reference or procurement contracts, saying their release would disclose details of the investigation’s scope and likely “prejudice the investigation of criminal offences”.

However, it did confirm that Guppy and councillors were told of the investigation before it began.

The council’s chief executive, Geoff Swainson, previously said it could be “a couple of weeks” before the investigation could produce a final report but he wasn’t sure whether it would be made public.

“The purpose in doing the investigation is to restore trust and confidence with the broader community, the business community in particular, that council has to deal with on a day-to-day basis.”

Article reproduced from The Post

23/06/25