A three-year Herald investigation into financial mismanagement at the office of the Māori King culminated this week with the sentencing of Rangi Whakaruru, widely considered to have been the power behind King Tūheitia, on serious fraud charges. As the net was tightening around him in NZ, he was meeting the Pope in Rome, reports Matt Nippert.
It was May 11, 2016 and the 140kg Rangi Whakaruru, also known as Rangi Wallace, was on a gurney at Auckland's private MercyAscot, preparing to go under the knife. But he didn't want anyone to know why.
He'd told his executive assistant Min Marshall, who was struggling to organise his calendar around a flurry of consultations and a multi-day hospital stay, the appointments related to a suspected diagnosis of stomach cancer.
In reality, he was undergoing elective gastric bypass surgery. The reasons for his lying would become obvious once the invoice - for $27,650 - arrived a week later.
Whakaruru requested the hospital chief executive reissue the documents with amendments, removing his name and the dates he was an inpatient, and instead recording it was for "medical services and treatments" for Māori King Tūheitia Paki, for whom Whakaruru served as right-hand-man.
Tainui, concerned about the ailing health of their monarch, had earlier approved a budget line of $200,000 to cover the cost of treatment for looming medical complications. Whakaruru's stomach-stapling invoice, bundled in with a handful of legitimate royal medical costs, was subsequently paid for out of this fund.
Perhaps realising the trick was so easy, Whakaruru repeated a variation of it six months later when King Tūheitia was admitted to Auckland Hospital in November to receive a kidney transplanted from his son Korotangi.
Despite the hospital and procedure falling squarely within the public health system, resulting in no charges, Whakaruru directed a new invoice be concocted totalling $80,263 - ostensibly covering the costs of this procedure and associated expenses. He had added fake "received" stamps and a cheque number claiming it had already been paid and the tribe needed to provide urgent reimbursement.
Just before Christmas, with the King having recovered from his major operation and moved home from the ICU ward, Tainui paid out on the invoice. Shortly after the sum was paid to the Ururangi Trust - a charity set up by and funded by Tainui to manage the King's affairs - Whakaruru transferred $30,000 into his own bank account.
A year later, having lost a third of his body weight and with a new wardrobe of slim suits, Whakaruru was back travelling the world as the grandly titled "principal private secretary" to the King and seemed to have got away with it.
The Auckland District Court heard this week Whakaruru had come from a troubled background, but opportunities in Hawaii and Australia has allowed him to climb a social ladder that eventually placed him next to the King and saw him regarded in Māoridom as a man of mana and influence.
But whispers had begun to percolate that all was not well at court, and wheels began turning that would eventually see the hand of the King lose his grip.
By mid-2017, the Herald became aware of allegations around the May 2016 operation and subsequent invoices, and reported concerns were serious enough for the Charities Service at the Department of Internal Affairs to open an investigation into Ururangi.
The process of justice was slowed by fearful sources and reluctance within Tainui to even indirectly criticise their revered King, despite him having unwittingly fallen under the influence of an apparent fraudster.
It was not until a year later that enough evidence - including acquiring a photo whose metadata placed Whakaruru in MercyAscot hospital in May 2016, and background interviews with multiple witnesses who could describe details of the doctored invoices - had been gathered to allow the bare bones of the sordid affair to be put on the front page of the Herald on Sunday on April 1, 2018.
As part of the reporting for that story, Whakaruru was interviewed for a short period at Auckland Airport after he'd arrived back from a flight to Wellington. He confirmed he'd had the operation, but said it had been paid for "by myself".
The claim was identical to that given a year later during two interviews with Serious Fraud Office investigators, resulting in him later also being convicted of supplying false and misleading information.
Whakaruru, sensing perhaps that meeting at the arrival lounge wasn't entirely a chance encounter, finally replied to Herald requests for comment: "I don't think for one minute that you bumped into me at all. I have no comment on what your [sic] are asking," he wrote.
Outside of that short interrogation as he walked from the Air New Zealand arrivals gate to the King's Range Rover, it would be the only public comment Whakaruru would ever make on a controversy that was beginning to engulf himself and the office of the King.
In hindsight, the red flags were obvious. In 2000, before his role with the King, Whakaruru had to withdraw as a spokesperson for a major anti-domestic violence campaign after admitting he was responsible for violence in his own family home.
He began his close relationship with the newly crowned Tūheitia in 2009, a role complicated by reports in 2012 that court documents showed he owed Inland Revenue more than $250,000.
And there were worrying signs of wild spending and a lack of oversight within Ururangi too. The recent Charities Service probe into Whakaruru was the second such investigation into the trust. A 2015 report - obtained by the Weekend Herald - outlined hundreds of thousands of dollars in unchecked cash withdrawals and spending on beauty products and treatments by the King's wife, Atawhai Paki.
That report also revealed the King himself was by now drawing an annual salary of $350,000.
Documents obtained by the Herald show Whakaruru was close behind in the salary stakes, pulling down $250,000 annually - plus tens of thousands more in cash bonuses and low-cost loans for international travel. One of his ex-partners was installed to oversee him as a trustee, and he employed his son in the office on a $48,000 salary for a job that didn't appear to require any work.
And the denials were getting desperate. Whakaruru and Ururangi refused to comment for the story outlining the suspicious MercyAscot invoice, but a week after it was splashed on the front page, Ururangi chairman Peter Rogers and the King's media adviser Tuariki Delamere went on Māori TV's Kawekōrero programme to mount a ultimately counterproductive counteroffensive.
"Yes we did pay for it and the allegations that were in the newspapers were aimed at the CEO, Rangi Whakaruru and I want to categorically say it was not him," Rogers said of the invoice in question.
The pair instead fingered an unnamed relative of King Tūheitia, and Delamere told Māori TV it was "disgusting that the New Zealand Herald are trying to get someone to disclose their private medical details".
This allegation, circulated by Whakaruru as a pre-emptive defence, had been checked by the Weekend Herald. The King's relative had indeed had a similar operation at the very same hospital, but it had occurred two years prior and the invoice - featuring a patient name and dates of treatment - had not been paid for by Tainui. The gambit was judged a cynical red herring.
The die, however, was now cast. Hours after that broadcast, a member of Tainui's executive wrote to Rogers saying they were "very disturbed" to hear an admission that funding for the King's medical expenses had been misused, and announced the financial taps to Ururangi were being turned off.
The affair also elevated concerns in government from those of possible poor governance to outright criminal fraud. In a panic, Ururangi deregistered itself as a charity, short-circuiting the nearly-complete Charities Service investigation. But this only deepened the crisis at court: The case was escalated and taken over by the Serious Fraud Office.
These investigators - with expertise in criminal matters and wide-ranging powers to demand information and interviews - would raid the King's Office a month later, taking away boxes of documents for analysis.
The SFO was able to obtain the original invoice from Mercy Ascott, along with the modified version Whakaruru had arranged for Tainui. These were presented to Tainui leadership by investigators during formal interviews and the reaction was near-universal revulsion.
"To be honest, I was disgusted. He was very deliberate, and it was quite a sophisticated level of deception and fraud. He knew what he was doing, and continued to do it, and had probably been doing it for quite some time," says one.
Meanwhile, despite the increasingly dramatic developments, Whakaruru was not stood down from his role and carried on working for the King.
A new entity - Kaitiaki Guardian Services - had been set up to govern the King's Office in place of Ururangi. Sir Wira Gardiner was brought in as chairman. Although this week Gardiner appeared in the public gallery of the Auckland District Court supporting Whakaruru at his sentencing, and the knight told Judge Aitken he was his cousin.
And May last year, Whakaruru was part of a Kīngitanga delegation to Rome for an audience with Pope Francis. Pictures taken by the Vatican Press Office show Whakaruru shaking the Pope's hand while a beaming King Tūheitia looks on.
Back in New Zealand, the net was tightening.
Late last year, news of pending criminal charges began to circulate amongst stakeholders - including Tainui's executive - and a planned Herald story on this significant development, intended for publication in November, was thwarted when Whakaruru responded to yet another request for comment by calling an emergency hearing at the Auckland District Court to successfully secure interim name suppression.
This wall of denial crumbled quickly. On December 12, the court heard he wrote a letter to the King apologising for his actions. And four days later, when Whakaruru appeared in the dock at Auckland District Court for the first time, the game was well and truly up.
His lawyer Guyon Foley - speaking before a packed press bench - dramatically dropped attempts to maintain name suppression and conceded there was a "certain inevitability" that the stark facts of the case would now be made public.
A quietly weeping Whakaruru pleaded guilty to five counts of obtaining by deception, and one of telling the same lies to SFO investigators he'd told the Herald 18 months earlier.
Delamere told the Herald, after Whakaruru finally admitted his guilt, that: "My feeling is one of great disappointment, to learn that a person I considered a friend had been continuously lying to me and to all around him, at the expense of the people, and at the expense of the mana the Kīngitanga and of King Tuheitia."
Rogers - who stood down as Ururangi chair when the trust reregistered in mid-2018 - did not respond to questions from the Weekend Herald.
Whakaruru appears to have remained working for the King for months - the King's Office said this week Whakaruru resigned on December 19 - despite it being under criminal investigation for very public allegations, later substantiated in court, he'd defrauded that very office.
But this week, after travelling the world, meeting the Pope, and looting the King's bank accounts for years, it seems he is done. His work email now bounces ("the address may be misspelled or may not exist") and trustees had been entirely turned over in May.
Judge Aitken, in sentencing remarks that showed a line-call between imprisonment or home detention, opted for the latter: One year of home detention, 300 hours of community service, and an order to repay $115,000.
The judge said Whakaruru's dramatic fall from grace over the past year, and accompanying publicity and loss of mana, had already seen him held partly accountable for his crimes.
"Your offending was clearly premeditated and, in my view, mildly sophisticated," she said. "Home detention is not a soft option."
Bustled out of court by his lawyer, to be fitted for an ankle bracelet ahead of a long drive to a relative's home in Whakatāne, once again Whakaruru declined an opportunity to comment.