Where is the due diligence?
Stuff reports:
Two government departments are investigating the mysterious NZ Edutech Trust charity, which took $500,000 in public funds without any clear evidence of what it’s been spent on – and a chairman who was already under scrutiny by Internal Affairs. Steve Kilgallon investigates.
They said they would work with children and schools, offering educational classes, tai chi, art workshops, parenting courses, cultural festivals and even try to “alleviate poverty” – and they got over half a million dollars in community funds to do that work.
But now the NZ Edutech Trust is facing two government investigations into what it actually did with all that money – and its founding trustee has said she felt “tricked” into being part of the organisation.
The Trust’s chair, Shun Xu, also known as Shun Liebenberg, has already been tied up in an inquiry into another charity of which she was a trustee, the Angel’s Children’s Educational Foundation. That charity received almost $1m in similar grants but appeared to shutter operations after a Stuff story in 2022 raising questions about what work it had actually done.
So the Chair had a bad track record, yet still got hundreds of thousands in this new charity.
The NZ Edutech Trust’s was duly formed in August 2021, with its founding trustees being Xie, Liebenberg, and Liebenberg’s husband, Tjaart Liebenberg.
Xie said she’d tried and failed to apply for grants from different providers in the past, but the new trust quickly had success with gaming machine trust BlueSky, which gave them $561,000 over 17 different grants between July 2022 and August 2023.
This is the amazing part – they got 17 different grants. Now I can imagine you make get an initial grant based on a proposal, but surely no sensible body would keep handing them out without proof of delivery.
BlueSky is a trust which distributes community grants from pokie machines. It states its purpose as providing grants for “education, community cultural and arts festivals, public amenities, sports facilities, amateur sport and other charitable and non-commercial purposes that are beneficial to the community”.
It did not respond to Stuff’s questions about what the grants were intended for, what reporting it required on their use, and what auditing it conducted.
Blue sky should be investigated also.