Long-serving Overseas Investment Office head sidelined

Overseas Investment Office director Annliese McClure has been sidelined by the appointment of a "new short-term deputy chief executive" at Land Information New Zealand.

Lesley Haines, a former deputy chief executive of both the Business, Innovation and Employment Ministry and before that the Labour Department, was appointed to the new position without fanfare late last week by the soon-departing Land Information New Zealand chief executive Peter Mersi.

The OIO is an autonomous operational unit of LINZ, with statutory responsibility for investigating, approving and making recommendations to cabinet ministers on foreign investment proposals, including investments involving strategically "sensitive" New Zealand land and other assets.

It routinely faces criticism over the length of time it takes to reach conclusions on foreign investment proposals.

Overseas investors are increasingly questioning the government's welcome for foreign direct investment after last year's rejection of the proposed sale of Lochinver Station by Stevenson Group to Chinese multi-national Shanghai Pengxin.

The OIO recommended the purchase after a protracted investigation, but it was turned down by Associate Finance Minister Paula Bennett and LINZ Minister Louise Upston.

The office has yet to make a recommendation to ministers on the joint venture proposal that would see Chinese investor Shanghai Maling gain effective control of the country's largest meat processing firm, Silver Fern Farms. A decision is required on the proposal by June 30, although the joint venture partners have signalled they could extend their deadline. 

Earlier this month, the OIO said it had stopped work on the application while it sought more information on the bid, saying it was "not in a position to indicate when the application will be sent to the relevant ministers for a decision."

LINZ and Ms Upston's office have confirmed OIO manager Ms McClure remains at the office but were not immediately able to comment on her current job title or the implications of having a new short-term deputy chief executive appointed above her, despite a tightly circulated press statement on the decision being issued on Thursday.

Labour's land information spokesman, David Cunliffe, says the decision is "a welcome step underlining how much work the OIO has to do to properly do its job."

"The appointment comes in the wake of a number of serious failures ... and is supposed to take pressure off Minister Upston's struggling OIO".

Ms Haines should check "how many other potentially dodgy deals have been approved", Mr Cunliffe says, in a reference to the 2014 approval of the Onetai Station sale to Argentinian bidders convicted in a water pollution case and who used Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers global tax avoidance leak, as their legal advisers on the transaction.

The government has accepted the OIO's argument that underfunding was slowing down approvals and allowed it to raise its fees for foreign investment applications so that more staff could be hired.

In response to a BusinessDesk request under the Official Information Act, the OIO confirmed it has 19 staff, of whom nine are senior solicitors, with three new appointments in May. The office declined to give information about the relevant experience of each OIO staff member on privacy grounds.

According to Ms Haines' LinkedIn profile, she is a board member of BRANZ, the building standards and research body, and of the Institute of Public Administration New Zealand.

Mr Mersi's statement said her role will be to "help bring on board additional staff as a result of recent fee increases to fund improvements for faster application screening ... and will manage some of the pressures on the team, enabling them to focus on their core work."

Ms McClure has been the OIO's manager since August 2005, when the Overseas Investment Commission was renamed and moved from under the wing of the Reserve Bank to LINZ.

She had been chief executive at the OIC for three months at the time of that change and has worked in the foreign investment approval process since early 2004.

(BusinessDesk)