Meet Wellington’s Chief Mr Bean Counter

For most of this year the city’s chief financial officer Peter Garty has been in discussions behind closed doors about Terry Serepisos’ rates debt to the council.  Until last week Garry Poole had refused to reveal the size of that debt.  We now know it’s $1.4 million.

Who is the man charged with getting it back?

Since November 2007 Peter Garty had been chief operating officer at the St Laurence finance company.

Former Telecom group financial controller Peter Garty has been appointed chief operating officer and will be responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of St Laurence.

That is the firm owned by Kevin Podmore and Mike O’Sullivan, which owes 9,000 mum and dad investors $245 million. Mike is also Adam Cunningham’s business partner in Village Accommodation.  Adam (a council candidate) has been endorsed by Rex Nicholls.

It wasn’t all plain sailing.  Kevin Podmore acknowledged that St Laurence had failed to keep credit rating agency Axis up to date about its problems, even though the financier was contractually obliged to do so.

My CEO [Peter Garty] got diverted onto other things. It was an oversight, unintentionally and there’s no more to it than that. I was very apologetic about it and that’s that. I can’t say any more than that.

St Laurence also sponsored councillor John Morrison’s radio show, before they went into liquidation.

What happened at Telecom? Peter Garty was the Telecom senior executive who in 2006 received the inappropriately taken Cabinet paper on Telecom by Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet public servant Michael Ryan. Ryan was fired but Garty was cleared by the SSC.  Ryan had asked his friend Garty not to make a copy.  Many commentators did not accept the explanations.  Russell Brown said on Kiwiblog:

I’m surprised both Garty and Telecom haven’t been criticised for copying the document, when we know that they both did just that.

Prime Minister Helen Clark told Parliament in a statement made under privilege “With respect to Mr Garty’s actions, I think the issue will be whether they were criminal or just deeply unethical.”

A later investigation by the Securities Commission found that:

At around 8.30 a.m. Mr Garty arrived at Telecom. He made a masked copy of the front page of the paper so as to remove the document identifiers that had appeared on it. He destroyed the original front page and replaced it with the masked copy front page (“the masked paper”).

Before that, Peter Garty, according to a statement made under privilege in Parliament, was “heavily criticised” by the Securities Commission over his auditing of BNZ’s accounts in the late 1980s and early 1990s when he was an auditor for Ernst and Young.