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He has married twice with two children from his first marriage and several {{Citation needed|date=July 2010}} from his second. He and his second wife, Heidi, are [[Anglicanism|Anglican]]s.<ref name=waikato2006/>
He has married twice with two children from his first marriage and several {{Citation needed|date=July 2010}} from his second. He and his second wife, Heidi, are [[Anglicanism|Anglican]]s.<ref name=waikato2006/>

'''The Winebox Affair'''<ref>The Paradise Conspiracy by Ian Wishart, Howling At The Moon, 1995</ref>

In 1992, New Zealand politician Winston Peters began raising a series of allegations in Parliament about prominent business leaders trying to bribe politicians. As he escalated his claims to include movie and bloodstock financing deals and tax havens in the Caribbean and the Cook Islands, it was revealed Peters had been meeting with a second-hand computer dealer named Paul White, who had come into possession of 92 floppy disks that had been inadvertently sold by Citibank’s New Zealand division with client banking data still on the disks.

Paul White was killed in a controversial pre-dawn car crash in Auckland on 4 September 1992, and when emergency services arrived on the scene the Citibank disks and NZ$15,000 in cash he had been paid in an out-of-court settlement by Citibank the previous day were missing.

Ian Wishart was assigned by the TV3 network to report on the case, and subsequently found ties between information on the Citibank disks and tax haven dealings. Wishart then came into possession of some confidential business transaction papers that became popularly known as “The Winebox documents” because they had first turned up in an old wine carton.

The documents detailed extensive tax avoidance and tax evasion schemes run through Cook Islands offshore companies associated with an entity part owned by the NZ Government state bank, the BNZ, and merchant bank Fay Richwhite & Co, whose principals Sir Michael Fay and Sir David Richwhite were close allies of both the Labour and National political parties.

Although Winston Peters and other financial journalists and newspapers also had copies of the Winebox documents, it was Ian Wishart who first identified the key “Magnum” and “JIF” transactions, later confirmed by the Privy Council and the New Zealand Court of Appeal to be prima facie criminal fraud against the revenues of New Zealand and Japan respectively.

Wishart was pressured by TV3 News director Rod Pedersen to drop the investigation and instead take up a promotion to the position of 3 National News Chief of Staff, a position Wishart had been appointed to in an acting capacity after the earlier resignation of the incumbent.
Wishart decided to quit the network however after being advised by former National Government cabinet minister, turned immigration consultant, Aussie Malcolm, that TV3’s Canadian CEO had been hit with an immigration status challenge by the NZ Government as a direct result of Wishart’s ongoing investigations into the tax haven deals.

TVNZ head of news Paul Norris immediately hired Wishart to continue working on the project as a special investigation for TVNZ, to be carried out in secret with the assistance of “Frontline” journalist Michael Wilson and producers Carol Hirschfeld and Mark Champion. The investigation was dubbed “Project X” internally.

The documentary was originally scheduled to air in December 1993, but was prevented from going to air by TVNZ management after the intervention of the TVNZ board of directors. Wishart and his colleagues decided to leak details of the banned programme to other news media, turning the blackout into a public issue.

The network was enjoined to an injunction forbidding broadcast of the programme, but the leak of further information made the gagging writ worthless and the documentary finally aired in June 1994 as a special primetime two hour broadcast. The revelations forced the establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Winebox transactions.

Although the Commission report initially exonerated the transactions, the Commission findings were overturned by New Zealand’s highest court which found the transactions were prima facie fraudulent and that the Commission had made substantial errors in finding otherwise.
Ian Wishart published three books detailing his investigations and the outcome: The Paradise Conspiracy (Howling At The Moon, 1995), The Vintage Winebox Guide (Howling At The Moon, 1996), and The Paradise Conspiracy 2 (Howling At The Moon, 1999).

Part of Wishart's first book, The Paradise Conspiracy, was loosely reworked as a feature film, "Spooked", starring Cliff Curtis and directed by Geoff Murphy.



==Selected bibliography==
==Selected bibliography==

Revision as of 12:15, 7 October 2010

Ian Wishart (born 1964) is a New Zealand journalist, author, an opponent to the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change, and the editor of Investigate magazine.

Wishart is a conservative Christian who generally advocates "right-wing" values. Wishart was highly critical of the Fifth Labour Government of New Zealand, and Prime Minister Helen Clark in particular, for alleged Marxist policies. Wishart also criticised gay activists, and sex education advocates for making factually incorrect statements in support of their initiatives.[1] More recently Ian Wishart has been critical of the teaching of evolution in schools and the theory of human induced climate change. Ian Wishart has no formal training in any field of Science.

Wishart claims that his book Eve's Bite (2007) is "the most politically incorrect book ever published in New Zealand"[2]. In the book, Wishart argues that New Zealand society is being "poisoned" and the Western world as a whole undermined "by seductive and destructive philosophies and social engineering that within the space of a generation have intellectually crippled the greatest civilisation the world has ever seen"[3]. His more recent books include Absolute Power (2008)[4], which details Helen Clark's years as Prime Minister and Air Con (2009), in which he alleges that man-made climate change is not significant against the scale of natural forcings, and that climate change is being used primarily as a revenue-generating exercise by the climate-industrial complex.[5] Both Absolute Power and Air Con were #1 bestselling titles on the NZ Booksellers List[6].

Wishart went to Onslow College, and studied journalism at Wellington Polytechnic, graduating in 1982. He has worked for Radio Windy, Radio Hauraki, Radio Pacific, TV3 and Television New Zealand. He started a book publishing company, Howling At The Moon, in 1995.[7]

He has married twice with two children from his first marriage and several [citation needed] from his second. He and his second wife, Heidi, are Anglicans.[7]

The Winebox Affair[8]

In 1992, New Zealand politician Winston Peters began raising a series of allegations in Parliament about prominent business leaders trying to bribe politicians. As he escalated his claims to include movie and bloodstock financing deals and tax havens in the Caribbean and the Cook Islands, it was revealed Peters had been meeting with a second-hand computer dealer named Paul White, who had come into possession of 92 floppy disks that had been inadvertently sold by Citibank’s New Zealand division with client banking data still on the disks.

Paul White was killed in a controversial pre-dawn car crash in Auckland on 4 September 1992, and when emergency services arrived on the scene the Citibank disks and NZ$15,000 in cash he had been paid in an out-of-court settlement by Citibank the previous day were missing.

Ian Wishart was assigned by the TV3 network to report on the case, and subsequently found ties between information on the Citibank disks and tax haven dealings. Wishart then came into possession of some confidential business transaction papers that became popularly known as “The Winebox documents” because they had first turned up in an old wine carton.

The documents detailed extensive tax avoidance and tax evasion schemes run through Cook Islands offshore companies associated with an entity part owned by the NZ Government state bank, the BNZ, and merchant bank Fay Richwhite & Co, whose principals Sir Michael Fay and Sir David Richwhite were close allies of both the Labour and National political parties.

Although Winston Peters and other financial journalists and newspapers also had copies of the Winebox documents, it was Ian Wishart who first identified the key “Magnum” and “JIF” transactions, later confirmed by the Privy Council and the New Zealand Court of Appeal to be prima facie criminal fraud against the revenues of New Zealand and Japan respectively.

Wishart was pressured by TV3 News director Rod Pedersen to drop the investigation and instead take up a promotion to the position of 3 National News Chief of Staff, a position Wishart had been appointed to in an acting capacity after the earlier resignation of the incumbent. Wishart decided to quit the network however after being advised by former National Government cabinet minister, turned immigration consultant, Aussie Malcolm, that TV3’s Canadian CEO had been hit with an immigration status challenge by the NZ Government as a direct result of Wishart’s ongoing investigations into the tax haven deals.

TVNZ head of news Paul Norris immediately hired Wishart to continue working on the project as a special investigation for TVNZ, to be carried out in secret with the assistance of “Frontline” journalist Michael Wilson and producers Carol Hirschfeld and Mark Champion. The investigation was dubbed “Project X” internally.

The documentary was originally scheduled to air in December 1993, but was prevented from going to air by TVNZ management after the intervention of the TVNZ board of directors. Wishart and his colleagues decided to leak details of the banned programme to other news media, turning the blackout into a public issue.

The network was enjoined to an injunction forbidding broadcast of the programme, but the leak of further information made the gagging writ worthless and the documentary finally aired in June 1994 as a special primetime two hour broadcast. The revelations forced the establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Winebox transactions.

Although the Commission report initially exonerated the transactions, the Commission findings were overturned by New Zealand’s highest court which found the transactions were prima facie fraudulent and that the Commission had made substantial errors in finding otherwise. Ian Wishart published three books detailing his investigations and the outcome: The Paradise Conspiracy (Howling At The Moon, 1995), The Vintage Winebox Guide (Howling At The Moon, 1996), and The Paradise Conspiracy 2 (Howling At The Moon, 1999).

Part of Wishart's first book, The Paradise Conspiracy, was loosely reworked as a feature film, "Spooked", starring Cliff Curtis and directed by Geoff Murphy.


Selected bibliography

  • The Paradise Conspiracy (1995) ISBN 0473033976
  • Ian Wishart’s vintage winebox guide. (1996) ISBN 0958356807
  • Lawyers, Guns & Money (1997)
  • An Irish Legacy (1998)
  • The Paradise Conspiracy II (1999) ISBN 095820540X
  • Ben & Olivia : what really happened? (1999) ISBN 0958205442
  • The god factor (1999) ISBN 0958205426
  • Beating Big Brother: how people power turned off the TV tax! (2000) ISBN 0958205485
  • Daylight robbery : the rise and fall of the "people’s bank" (2001) ISBN 0958205469
  • Eve's Bite (2007) ISBN 9780958240116
  • The Divinity Code (2007) ISBN 9870958240123
  • Absolute Power: The Helen Clark Years (2008)
  • Air Con (2009) ISBN 9780958240147
  • Arthur Allan Thomas: The Inside Story (September 2010) ISBN 978-0-9582401-7-8

References

  1. ^ http://www.investigatemagazine.com/interview.pdf
  2. ^ Ian Wishart, Eve's Bite (2007) ISBN 9780958240116
  3. ^ Ibid
  4. ^ Ian Wishart, Absolute Power: The Helen Clark Years (2008) ISBN 978-0958240130
  5. ^ Ian Wishart, Air Con (2009) ISBN 978-0958240147
  6. ^ http://www.booksellers.co.nz/documents/bestsellers_09_may2.pdf
  7. ^ a b Monahan, Kate (25 March 2006), "Public investigator", Waikato Times, p. 3
  8. ^ The Paradise Conspiracy by Ian Wishart, Howling At The Moon, 1995
allikas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3ADiff%2F389306899