The Gambler throws the dice once too often

The earlier post: Look Alikes appears to have had a ring of truth about it when one considers this story on the Herald's website today.

The Great Gambler appears to have thrown the flip flop dice once too often - this time they've fallen against the run of play.

Where was John Key when Allan Hawkins needed him?

National Party leader John Key faces accusations of misleading the public about his knowledge of one of New Zealand's most notorious white collar crimes, the New Zealand Herald website reported today.

An item posted on the newspaper's website said the allegations centred around the so-called H-Fee -- two payments totalling $A66.5 million to Equiticorp funnelled via sham foreign exchange transactions in 1988 -- and an interview Mr Key gave the Herald last year.

During the interview in August 2007, Mr Key confirmed he worked as a foreign exchange dealer at Elders Merchant finance, part of Elders IXL, which made the payments to the Allan Hawkins-controlled Equiticorp.

But he said he left Elders in 1987, before the transactions were processed.

"Three months before any of these deals got decided I left Elders...I was never involved in them," Mr Key said during the interview.

The Herald said it had checked court documents made public by the Labour Party which included the fact that Mr Key resigned from Elders in June 1988, six months after the first payment.

It said there was no evidence Mr Key was involved in handling the sham transactions.

The Herald said it had read the 13,000 page court file in Melbourne which contained a statement by Mr Key in which he said he resigned from Elders on June 24, 1988, and was immediately placed on leave because he was going to a rival company.

It said Labour was planning to drop the "bombshell" on the election campaign trail tomorrow.

Prime Minister Helen Clark said if the Herald had published the story then they obviously believed there were questions to answer.

Miss Clark said it was not a story that she was handling, but whether it was a bombshell depended on the answers to the questions raised by the story.

Asked if it was appropriate for Labour to be digging around in Mr Key's past, Miss Clark said the lives of political leaders were open books.

The Axe Falls on Kiwisaver - Key untrustworthy yet again.

This cartoon says it all. Here is the first wedge of the workers' benefits to be axed under a Key lead government. Remember a gambler prefers to gamble with other peoples' money while ensuring the house retains its share!

Irony or Truth? The Gambler & the Casino.

A couple of postings ago I wrote an analysis of the National Party's economic policies and the supposed economic management expertise of their present finance spokespeople. In that posting I commented on the parallels that exist between riverboat gamblers and the money "traders" who gamble on the money markets.
I noted that the leader of the National Party made his reputation working for Merrill Lynch as a gambling speculator on the NZ dollar during the 1980s. Other bloggers have noted that the gambling on the NZ dollar at that time almost caused a collapse of the NZ economy if the Reserve Bank hadn't intervened.
It is, therefore, with great interest and a sense of the heavily ironic that one notes that the National Party with its "Great Gambler" at its helm is to launch its official 2008 campaign at The Sky-City Casino in Auckland on the 12th of October.
It is, perhaps. fitting that a political party with its roots deeply embedded in speculation, in money market gambling and other gaming activities should decide to associate itself with a Casino as it attempts to persuade the N.Z. public that it has a rational, well thought through and non speculative set of policies that would fit it to govern the country responsibly.