The best story I've worked on, and why:
I'd started my career as a feature writer, heavy on the arts, but a couple of weeks after reinventing myself in 2010 as a business
news reporter, South Canterbury Finance collapsed. It was a billion-dollar company, and being intimidated by the scale of the story and my new role I decided to focus narrowly on one transaction - tens of millions of bad loans to Auckland's then-Hyatt hotel - to limit myself to something I could conceivably understand.
Property and companies office records showed the multi-million-dollar building complex had been owned by a company directed by a guy in Christchurch called Peter Symes. I found his name in the phonebook, called him up, and he immediately confessed he'd never visited the hotel, was a former meatworker with terminal cancer, and had only got involved after his brother-in-law - an SCF director - asked him to put his name to a company to prevent the bad loans being classed as related party.
The Serious Fraud Office raided our newsroom a couple of weeks later to collect my notes, $1.5 billion of fraud charges were laid, and the Hyatt transaction and Symes shell game was roundly criticised in a High Court judgement that saw the brother-in-law director convicted.
The one that got away:
Several years ago I obtained, from an anonymous source, several pages relating to fairly aggressive tax structuring advice given to a prominent Member of Parliament. It was eye-popping stuff, involving a shell company in a Malaysian tax haven, a sham contracting agreement and bank accounts in Hong Kong and the Caymans.
After several weeks' work I was able to determine the documents weren't fake - but I was not able to prove the plans were followed through. And it's fair to say the story subject issued a fairly rigorous denial of any wrongdoing.
As journalists we have to write the story we can prove, not the story we want. So this yarn was parked. Further documents weren't forthcoming, the MP later left Parliament, and that eye-popping draft story seemingly destined for the front page will likely forever remain in my bottom drawer.
Career highlight:
The year-long tax gap series in 2016: It was a numbers story, based on a painstaking collation and reading of financial statements, that tried to work out how much tax large international companies paid in New Zealand. Spoiler alert: Many high-profile, wildly profitable, firms paid basically nothing.
The story changed the governments' mind, from initial claims there was no problem, to acknowledging the issue, and finally proposing and passing legislation that is expected to claw back $200m annually in avoided tax. The series, and the Herald, were credited in parliamentary speeches for helping drive the reforms.
I love journalism because:
It's a job that gives you free rein to figure out how the world actually works, and share your findings with the public. What other gig can get you into (and out of) prisons, warzones, boardrooms and crime scenes? The focused, and short-term, lines of inquiry are perfect for those verging on ADHD.
But if I couldn't be a journalist, I'd...
Be a university researcher, or a private detective. Anything that'd allow me to keep poking around strange happenings.
