Citizen Liu

Guyon Espiner reopened the Bill Liu cash-for-citizenship scandal last night on 60 Minutes. And he has summarised what he has discovered from official documents released under the OIA in this blog-post:

It’s not often that you put an item of nearly 20 minutes to air and still feel that there was plenty more of the story still to tell.

60 Minutes Producer Chris Wilks and I spent a month digging deep into the story of Citizen Yan and had access to documents giving us an enormous amount of detail.

But we still feel there is plenty we don’t know.

In fact all the things which, for most people are very simple, in Yan’s case, are opaque.

Like what’s his name? Yong Ming Yan, Yang Liu, Bill Liu, Wiremu Liu and William Yan are among his monikers. The search warrant for his Metropolis apartment also seeks documents in the name of Yong Ming Run.

Because of the time constraints that a programme like 60 Minutes imposes, Espiner had to pack a lot into what became a very fast-paced story. You could say that Bill Liu is the epitome of the International Mystery Man.

But what was most noticeable was the reluctance of his former Labour Party mates to shed any light on Citizen Liu. Espiner's last comment is probably his most telling:

The greatest mystery to me is why Jones approved the citizenship application and did so without documenting his reasons.

He says he made a file note of an official telling him that Yan would be sent to his death and his organs harvested if he returned to China.

Jones hasn’t produced the note and says he didn’t put it on the file. Why not? There are hand written notes from Jones on Parliamentary notepad paper in the file we saw. But not that one.

He says he’s glad he didn’t put it on the file because the file “leaked”. But if you were a Minister making a controversial decision against the advice of officials wouldn’t you want your reasons to be there in black and white when the scrutiny came on?

The Auditor General will now pick over these bones and be asking many of the questions we, and many journalists before us, have been asking.

The biggest question for Shane Jones is, does he have a political future?

Recent activity on a certain stock at iPredict suggests that Shane Jones' political future is far from secure, irrespective of what the Auditor-General's inquiry finds. He has been hung out to dry by his former colleagues.