Toitū te Waiora CEO Donovan Clarke used work credit card for lobster, booze

Donovan Clarke was appointed chief executive of Toitū te Wairoa in October last year, and since then has used his corporate card to spend more than double what his five fellow Workforce Development Council chief executives have combined. Photo / Michael Cunningham

The chief executive of a public agency used his taxpayer-funded credit card to pay for lobster dinners, booze and multiple post-midnight taxis during a work trip to Sydney earlier this year.

The August trip by Donovan Clarke, chief executive of Toitū te Waiora, to attend a conference run by the Council of Ambulance Authorities, cost taxpayers nearly $6325.

The four-day trip was capped by Clarke enjoying a lunch of wings and beer, dinner of lobster, prawn and calamari, before finally getting a taxpayer-funded taxi back to his four-star hotel at 3:36am - just three hours before another taxi was hailed to take him from Novotel Darling Harbour to Sydney Airport for his return flight to Wellington.

Toitū te Waiora, responsible for improving industry education in the health and social service sectors, is one of six Workforce Development Councils (WDCs) set up last year in a major reform of vocational education.

At the time of their establishment, Minister of Education Chris Hipkins said it was a “major milestone in what is the biggest reform of vocational education in a generation”.

Clarke worked for more than a dozen years as a police officer before moving into executive and board positions in a number of health and education organisations a decade ago. He was appointed as Toitū te Waiora’s inaugural chief executive in October last year.

WDC chief executive credit card spending obtained under the Official Information Act shows Clarke used his publicly funded credit card more than twice as much in the first 11 months of the WDCs existence than the five other chief executives combined

Clarke is recorded as having used his card to spend $72,862.03 between October and August, compared to just $30,713.98 in total for the five other chief executives put together.

National Party tertiary education spokeswoman MP Penny Simmonds said the revelations meant “questions need to be asked about how that has happened, and whether such significant expenses are appropriate”.

She said public sector chief executives like Clarke needed to be setting an example for the wider education sector: “When the vocational sector is under immense financial pressure as we are seeing now, it is paramount that senior leaders are acting responsibly.”

The Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), which oversees the Workplace Development Councils, said it was aware of some “concerns” about overspending, but said the councils themselves were responsible for managing the performance of their chief executives.

“We have confidence that the [Toitū te Waiora] council is responding appropriately,” TEC deputy chief executive Gillian Dudgeon said.

Requests to interview Clarke and his chairman David Waters were declined, with Waters instead issuing a statement saying Clarke was on leave and not available for comment.

Waters did not respond to follow-up questions about whether Clarke’s leave was paid, planned, or administrative.

Emails and calls to Clarke also went unanswered this week.

Waters defended the spending by his chief executive but acknowledged Toitū Te Waiora was evolving and said the apparently excessive credit card use was at least partially accounted for by it being used to book all staff travel.

“We have updated a number of our policies, including sensitive expenditure, treasury, HR, delegations and a host of others. The aberration in CEO P-Card expenditure is primarily due to a decision to charge all travel and accommodation to the P-card rather than to utilise an external travel agency as used by other WDCs,” he said.

Water said Toitū Te Waiora “ensures that attendance at national and international conferences are pertinent to the business of our WDC and value is obtained.”

Waters is also the chief executive of CAA, the organiser of the Sydney conference.

Receipts from Clarke’s Sydney trip include post-midnight taxi trips on each of his four nights stayed, and $1824.75 spent on accommodation and snacks at the four-star Novotel Darling Harbour.

The receipts also show he used his corporate credit card to buy two rounds of Caipiroska cocktails at Cyren Restaurant & Bar, Tiger beer and Korean wings worth $87 from Wingboy, and a prawn, calamari and mornay-sauce slathered half-lobster feast for $108 from surf and turf joint Fins and Ribs.

Earlier versions of internal spreadsheets released under the OIA used to track Clarke’s spending classed the drinks, wings and beer, and lobster meal as, respectively: “External Drinks Meeting Darling harbour”; “Lunch and Drinks with ?”; and “Dinner with ? Manly Sydney”, while a later version of the spreadsheet subsequently listed the expenses as “Repaid/refunded”.

Waters declined to detail whether these refunds had occurred before or after the Herald on Sunday first requested details of spending on September 21.

At Sydney Airport on his way home, a presumably tired and hungry Clarke used his card to spend $21.63 on a bacon wrap and coffee for breakfast and then sprung $79.35 for a voucher to access Singapore Airlines’ luxury SilverKris lounge less than 90 minutes before being required to board his 9:40am flight to Wellington.

Clarke subsequently lost the receipt for this lounge voucher, but Waters signed a form on August 29 declared the expenditure as “authorised or necessarily incurred”.