A diplomatic incident standoff between Tonga and New Zealand has been bubbling away about some unaccounted for aid money.
The Tongan Auditor General was the first to raise the issue in November when he discovered after the elections, that around $250,000 of the donor money could not be accounted for. The money had been transferred from Treasury to the Prime Minister’s Office, where bookkeeping was not as rigorous. He made recommendations to rectify the situation.
But the New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully subsequently said New Zealand Government was not prepared to leave the matter unresolved, and launched an independent audit. This audit found no evidence of fraud, but McCully went on to say:
“The issues have arisen due to poor record-keeping rather than anything more suspicious. We have made it clear to the Tongan Government that we expect a higher standard of accounting for aid funding in future.”
Idiom is a funny thing- It was reported that in an interview in the Tongan language about unaccounted for money Tongan Auditor General, Pohiva Tu’i’onetoa, said McCully “has a ‘face’ towards the New Zealand public. And he has a ‘face’ towards us here in Tonga.” Somehow, that ended up in the English press as the Attorney General calling McCully two faced.
Pohiva Tu’i’onetoa is now under threat of dismissal.
In a blog in the Huffington Post, an Cleo Paskal Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, analysed what happened and passed a scathing judgement on New Zealand’s handling of the situation.
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