In the UK there is a new scandal about a rich man using NDAs, and maybe what in New Zealand are sometimes called "Cull orders" (coverups from a judge for a sex pest).
This time the big UK scandal is Harrod's owner, Mohammed Al-Fayed, but it has woken up the discussions as well about Harvey Weinstein. Zelda Perkins, who exposed Weinstein's use of coverups and got his lawyer into serious trouble, is back in the news. The discussion is opening up.
In the UK the sex pests who've made big news so far are rich private businessmen who pay their own coverup lawyers. In New Zealand it's historically been a bit different. It's been public servants and judges together making it routinely and obviously available, with no resistance from Parliament at all.
We've reported how Judges Graeme Colgan and Bruce Corkill openly abandoned the rule of law that Judge Tom Goddard had upheld. They covered up corruption in Tauranga and blackmail at Victoria University, and ordered the lawyers to be paid out of public money instead of posecuted. They extended their own jurisdiction to give them all the powers of a proper court but applying whatever "laws" they and certain favoured managers wanted.. it is all very public and it is going to be very, very embarrassing for everyone involved.
At the moment thought it has just been very, very profitable for them.
There are direct links to the UK that we expect to become very, very embarrassing to certain British figures.
Some of the people we expect to be of interest in the UK have already had a lot of publicity. We're thinking there of Warwick Reid, Geoffrey Palmer, Andrew Little, Stephen Kos ... they go back a long way and their part in the high level coruption stories of the 1990s is already documented. But there are others whose roles have been less talked about.
One is John Sissons, the Hong Kong lawyer from the law firm Herbert Smith who was Kos's counterpart in promising Reid immunity from prosecution and bringing him back to New Zealand, with the support of Geoffrey Palmer's government. He's almost disappeared. Another one is Tony Smith, a supposed academic who seemed to be trying to erase his traces until ... certain British judges came forward publicly to ally themselves with him and ... his old university in the UK, which booted him out twenty years ago, and his college there, which still has him on its books, could not deny he was a "fraudster".
We'll be looking further at these and other angles and at the legal developments which, like those men, go back a long way.
So far as the British establishment is concerned, we expect questions are being asked already about the ... judgment of ... those judges who publicly allied themselves with Tony Smith. Of particular interest in the UK will be the strange conduct of Michael Tugendhat, the father of Tom Tugendhat, an MP involved in Foreign Affairs and Security who is running for leader of the Conservative Party ...
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