The scandal around Paul Eagle keeps getting uglier.
Last week this column set out the Auditor-General’s damning findings on Eagle’s tenure as chief executive of the Chatham Islands Council: the $460,000 gold-plated house renovation, the fabricated documents, the forged builder’s signature, the admission that he “panicked.” The Serious Fraud Office is now assessing whether to open a criminal investigation.
What has received less scrutiny is the other major thread running through this scandal — the lobbying-consulting firm involved. Andrea Vance reported in The Post yesterday that the Chatham Islands Council paid Agite Consulting Limited (pronounced “ah-jeet”), a total of $433,509.91 between January 2024 and November 2025. That is, as Vance put it, “nearly half a year’s rates” for a council that serves around 600 people, runs at the edge of a $500,000 bank overdraft, and gets more than 95 per cent of its revenue from the Crown.
Nearly half a year’s rates. To one Wellington firm. On a verbal contract. Without a tender. Not to fix water pipes or shore up a wharf, but to buy strategy, governance reviews, stakeholder engagement, and the machinery of political influence.
How the money flowed
The Auditor-General’s report described how Eagle engaged “a consultancy firm with which he had a pre-existing connection” without following the council’s procurement processes. The engagement began without a formal contract — just a verbal arrangement. On hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of evolving consultancy work. In a public organisation. When contracts were eventually signed, they were “generally retrospective, in whole or in part.”
The invoices show where the money went, and the answer is not into pipes, roads, or ferries. The biggest bucket was “government relations”: $164,639. Then came the 30-year plan at $120,556. The “island deal” cost another $86,250.
The number of hours worked was not evident on the invoices. Interim chief executive Bob Penter confirmed there was no formal tender, no request for proposals, and no internal evaluation of the work. What did ratepayers get for that level of spend? The council’s own information request response says it is “not aware of any internal evaluation reports relating to the work undertaken by Agite.” When you are buying influence-industry goods — narrative, positioning, stakeholder strategy — you often don’t get measurable outputs. You get process, meetings, documents, and the feeling that something is happening. The invoice arrives regardless.
Around $164,000 of the Agite bill was claimed from “Better Off Funding”, which is Crown money established by the previous Labour Government through its Three Waters reforms, intended for community wellbeing projects. When the Department of Internal Affairs asked in May 2024 whether unspent funds could go to urgent water infrastructure, Eagle told them $175,000 was “fully contracted and being delivered.” At the time, just one $20,000 contract actually existed. The Auditor-General called that misleading. It shows how quickly discretionary central government funding can be repurposed into the influence economy rather than spent on tangible delivery.
The “Pre-existing connection”
The Auditor-General’s report, tabled in Parliament last week, does not name the firm. It refers to a “supplier” with which the chief executive had a “pre-existing connection.” That “pre-existing connection” line? It’s auditor-speak for “calling in a favour”. Eagle did not go to the market. He went to people he already knew. The Auditor-General is careful in tone, but the substance is blunt: Eagle “did not follow the Council’s policy, use a robust procurement process, or demonstrate good contract management practices.” No competitive process. No documentation showing value for money. Contracts signed retrospectively. Eagle retained management of the contract despite the obvious conflicts.
That line about “pre-existing connections” should trouble anyone who cares about clean government. Procurement rot starts here. Normalised. Not criminal; it’s worse. The political class entitlement: mates first, process later.
Who is Agite?
Agite was until January 2024 called Pollock Consulting Limited, a vehicle for Greg Pollock. Pollock is a former General Manager of Metlink at Greater Wellington Regional Council and former Managing Director of Transdev New Zealand. He is also a board member of the Wellington Chamber of Commerce and an independent director of Tranzit Group, the largest family-owned bus company in the country, which operates about 60 per cent of the Metlink bus network under contract to the very same regional council where Pollock once worked. He now runs a consultancy advising on transport and infrastructure issues in the same policy world he once helped manage. The layers of intersecting interests are considerable.
In January 2024 the company rebranded and brought Raphael Hilbron on board as partner and director. Hilbron’s CV is a how-to guide for the revolving door: Press Secretary to Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, then to Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, then 15 years at SenateSHJ, where he rose to Managing Partner of its New Zealand operations. Six months after Hilbron left for Agite, SenateSHJ collapsed into liquidation, owing approximately $538,000 to former partners. At least two senior staff migrated to Agite, transplanting a chunk of SenateSHJ’s government relations capability into a new shell.
SenateSHJ’s final years were themselves controversial. An RNZ investigation by Guyon Espiner revealed its staff had been physically embedded in Commerce Commission offices while simultaneously representing private clients in the same sectors. The firm billed more than $616,000 for advice on selling Three Waters to the public. Emma Ward, another Agite associate partner, came across from SenateSHJ where she worked on Three Waters communications.
This concentration of insider knowledge and institutional access is what Paul Eagle was buying with Chatham Islands ratepayer and Crown funds.
The Revolving door: Campbell Barry and Peri Zee
The revolving door is not subtle here.
Campbell Barry, former two-term Mayor of Lower Hutt and former Vice President of Local Government New Zealand, joined Agite in November 2025 as Head of Local Government and Partnerships — weeks after leaving office as Mayor. The firm’s press release described him as bringing “extensive knowledge and experience from 15 years in local government.” Which is one way of putting it. Another way: he is monetising his insider access to the sector he just left. A commenter on Wellington.Scoop captured the mood: “People worry about the central government–lobbyist pathway … seems alive and well in local government too.”
An official information release of text messages shows that when Barry joined Agite, he texted Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to let him know and to offer help. Luxon responded positively, suggesting Barry contact Ministers Simon Watts and Chris Bishop, noting there was “a bit going on in the LG space” where Barry’s perspective might be useful. No impropriety. But it illustrates, in unusually candid form, how easily a former mayor parlays political relationships into commercial access on behalf of a consulting firm.
Then there is Peri Zee. Before she won the Upper Hutt mayoralty in October 2025, Zee was a senior consultant at Agite. In fact, she was the project lead on the Chatham Islands engagement. According to Vance’s reporting, Zee wrote the islands’ failed government regional deal bid and was present at council meetings throughout 2025. She was, in other words, one of the people billing the cash-strapped Chatham Islands Council while simultaneously preparing to stand for election. When asked about the spending, Zee instead referred questions to Agite. Agite declined to answer.
At the very same October 2025 election, Barry left the Lower Hutt mayoralty and joined Agite. Zee left Agite and won the Upper Hutt mayoralty. A tag-team exchange across the Hutt Valley: one mayor out the revolving door into the Agite consultancy, one Agite consultant through it into a mayoral chain. The two cities share a border. The networks could hardly be tighter.
The Wife and the subcontract
One of the Agite contract variations, worth $109,600, proposed Eagle’s wife Miriam as on-island project lead for the council’s 30-year strategy. Her estimated monthly fee: $27,400 plus GST.
The Auditor-General found no evidence that other councillors or staff were told about the conflict. Eagle continued to manage the contract.
Although Miriam Eagle’s subcontracting was formally approved, the work did not in the end proceed. So, here we have a CEO using Crown money, paying a firm he had pre-existing ties with, and proposing to subcontract part of that work to his own wife. This is where the scandal stops being about sloppy administration and starts looking like self-dealing.
A Labour circle?
Eagle was a Labour MP for six years, the first Māori male to win a general electorate seat for the party in more than a century. He remains, as far as anyone knows, a party member. The Agite lobbying firm is not formally Labour-affiliated. But its orbit includes several people with Labour-adjacent networks: Zee’s sympathies appear centre-left, Barry was a Labour-aligned Hutt mayor, and the work Eagle commissioned was funded partly through Labour’s Three Waters’ “Better Off Funding”.
None of this proves a political arrangement. But it is worth asking: is the Eagle-Agite contracting an example of politically connected people looking after each other? Not in the crude, cash-in-a-brown-envelope way. In the New Zealand way: contracts, “strategic advisory,” and the quiet recycling of insiders into paid influence work funded by public money.
Labour still has not said a word. No condemnation. No expression of concern. No statement about whether Eagle remains a member. Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) has also been completely silent, despite this being one of the most significant local government integrity scandals in years. LGNZ is the organisation that should be loudest about clean procurement and governance when councils get captured by poor process. Yet its former Vice President now works for the firm at the centre of this scandal. That may explain the silence.
The SFO and what comes next
The Chathams council has unanimously referred the Auditor-General’s report to the Serious Fraud Office. The SFO confirmed it is assessing whether to open an enquiry or criminal investigation. Local Government Minister Simon Watts called it “a very serious matter.”
Jonathan Milne reported in Newsroom yesterday that the council is now in do-or-die talks with government, with Regional Development Minister Shane Jones refusing to release more quota and grant funding until the community draws on its own resources. The financial mess Eagle left behind is shaping survival negotiations for 600 people on a remote island.
Wellington looks after Wellington
This scandal is not really about one man in a remote council. It is about how easily public money can be directed to politically connected firms when there are no rules. We don’t have a lobbying register or cooling-off periods. New Zealand doesn’t even have any requirement to use competitive procurement for advisory work.
Unsurprisingly, New Zealand ranks 35th out of 38 OECD countries for regulating influence on policymaking. Australia mandates an 18-month cooling-off period. Canada, five years. New Zealand? Zero.
The Agite-Chatham affair is a case study in what that void looks like. A firm built on revolving-door credentials — a former public transport chief, a former Beehive press secretary, a former mayor, a soon-to-be mayor — secures a major contract with a tiny, Crown-funded council on the basis of a personal connection, without a tender, without itemised invoices. And when the arrangement is investigated, the person who engaged them fabricates documents and lies to regulators.
The bigger question: why do we keep building a democracy where insiders are rewarded through public contracting arrangements that are poorly scrutinised, weakly evaluated, and culturally protected? This is how trust is drained. Not in one grand act, but in the steady conversion of public money into insider-economy money, while everyone insists it is all perfectly normal.
Labour has said nothing. LGNZ has said nothing. Agite hid behind a lawyerly non-answer. That is not an accident. That is the culture. What it all tells you is that nobody in this Eagle-Agite network wants sunlight on how the game is played.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project
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