Kōrero: Business failures and corporate fraud

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) was set up in 1990 to investigate and prosecute serious fraud. In 1994 Winston Peters, leader of the New Zealand First political party, alleged impropriety by the SFO and the Inland Revenue Department. He tabled 1,860 pages of papers brought from the Cook Islands into Parliament in a cardboard winebox – hence the affair’s popular name, the winebox inquiry. A commission of inquiry cleared the SFO of any wrong-doing.