A stash of secret mayoral files were not the only documents that went astray in discarded Wellington City Council furniture, and a “furious” former mayor urged for a legal injunction to block publication after the Herald obtained the collection, new details of a privacy breach reveal.
It has also emerged consultants have been called in to investigate the incident, which saw top secret files land in public hands after being left in an old mayoral desk sold at the city’s Tip Shop.
In September, the council declared a privacy breach after 2000-odd pages of some of the most sensitive information to pass through the mayor’s office between the late 1980s and early 2000s ended up in the possession of a Breaker Bay builder.
Raymond Morgan purchased the old mayoral desk from the Wellington Southern Landfill Tip Shop for $200 after it was cleared from the old Town Hall.
Morgan tried to report it to the council, but said they fobbed him off. The council said it did take the report seriously, but did not manage to recover the documents before they were provided to the Herald.
A play-by-play of the ”tough day" at the council’s HQ has been released under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act, offering a peek behind the curtain of how the fallout was managed.
Morgan made a Facebook post on the afternoon of September 24, claiming to have found a “treasure trove” of files in the desk.
Media contacted the council’s communications team, who quickly asked council officers whether it could be true.
A member of the communications team sent an email to staff with the subject line “secret papers in Town Hall table drawer - or not?!”
A staffer responded that all furniture was checked before being taken to the Tip Shop from the Capital E building, which housed the Town Hall’s old furniture.
“We consider the risk of any paperwork remaining in that piece to be low,” the staffer said of the mayoral desk.
“I think someone’s been trying to wind us up,“ another email said.
But further emails reveal that a week earlier, other staff were made aware of more documents that had been discovered in other furniture, and some had made their way to the Tip Shop despite prior checks.
Those clearing old furniture had been “bumping into some more items” in the derelict Capital E building, emails said, including a “large amount of documentation from the 90s”.
A photo included in the email chain shows stacks of old documents, which do not appear to have been properly stored. It is unclear whether they contained the same level of confidential information as those from the mayoral desk.
These documents were ordered to be disposed of.
A council staffer wrote that other documents had made their way to the Tip Shop in more furniture for sale, despite earlier being cleared by the council.
Those papers narrowly avoided being sold to the public after Tip Shop staff double checked furniture before putting it on the shop floor and “found some papers in a cabinet”.
They were then handed over to the moving company that had transported the furniture from the Capital E site.
The moving company asked the council what to do with them, before disposing of them.
“Great to hear a second check took place at the tip shop and that a few additional papers were captured for disposal,” a council staff member said.
The revelations are in contrast to discussions between the Herald and council. This newsroom questioned whether there was a chance more documents, not just those in the mayoral desk, had been wrongly discarded. A council spokesman responded “we don’t believe so.”
The day Morgan revealed the cache of documents in the desk, consulting firm Grant Thornton was called in by council chief executive Matt Prosser to undertake an independent third-party investigation.
“Facepalm”, a council manager wrote in an email when learning of the situation.
They went on to speak ill of Morgan, saying “this particular customer is a regular customer and he definitely is a special one.”
“As far as I am aware of this customer, he does have a tendency to create a mountain out of a molehill,” they said.
Not long after the council was made aware of the privacy breach, it began being contacted by former mayors who had learnt of the situation through the media.
“FYI all that I’ve been called by an angry Dame Fran Wilde (mayor till 1995),“ a council staffer said. ”Fran says we should injunct – I said I’d pass on the advice."
Another email described Wilde as “furious” over not being put through to the council’s chief executive about the matter when she called.
The council did not take legal action, but wrote a letter requesting the documents be returned by the Herald.
Further emails show a multi-department working group was formed by the council to handle the scandal. That group’s correspondence was withheld.
The Grant Thornton investigation has been ongoing for over a month, and the council said the purpose of the work is to “understand the context of the situation and help prevent a reoccurrence of such events”.
Grant Thornton has been tasked with writing a report into the situation, which is expected to land before Christmas.
Ethan Manera is a Wellington-based journalist covering Wellington issues, local politics and business in the capital. He can be emailed at ethan.manera@nzme.co.nz.