Mark Hotchin & the Uncivil Society – When Will We Wake Up?

I wrote the below on New Zealand businessman Mark Hotchin, director of failed finance company, Hanover, on 1 June, 2012:

 

This being the first day of June, 2012, I am simply publishing a piece I first penned December, 2011, to mark the then first twelve months of ex-Finance Company director Mark Hotchin's asset freeze, not only without trial, but without a charge having been laid. Nothing has changed from when I wrote this; Hotchin now enters his nineteenth month without any criminal charge by the state, and it's sadly looking like, when his assets and his - and his families - lives were frozen, the state had no criminal case in prospect of prosecution. What a shameful indictment of the (lack of) the rule of law in New Zealand, as I define this in my article following.

I don't know Mark Hotchin, I'm neither defending nor attacking him: we simply owe it to ourselves to dispassionately understand the nature of the society we live in, and most of us would know what sort of a state practices detention without trial; well, an asset freeze with neither trial nor charge, for nineteen months, is a police state. When we smugly watch the nascent protests against Putin in Russia, and draw the obvious conclusions about that state, we are all missing the jackboots standing inside every room in New Zealand.

More and more I ask myself how can this happen? Every NBR and interest.co.nz thread about Hotchin is full of personal vitriol against the man, with no one seemingly able to grasp the desperate principles underneath his frozen life. I suspect it just shows how slavish as a society we have become behind the IRon Drape, in which the unprincipled hate of people laughing at the state-built gallows of their own lives, is part of the course in a country where a vigilante TV show consistently tops the weekly ratings.

 

This week we find from NBR:

 

The directors and promoters of the failed Hanover Finance group of companies will have their day in court in the middle of next year, more than three years after civil proceedings were filed against them by the Financial Markets Authority.

 

[Snip.]

 

The hearing date comes more than a year after the Serious Fraud Office completed its $1.1 million, 32-month probe into Hanover, which raised some concerns around the lender's behaviour but found nothing that crossed the threshold to warrant a criminal prosecution.

 

[Snip.]

Principal Mark Hotchin's assets have been frozen since December 2010 by the FMA's predecessor, the Securities Commission, including the proceeds from his multi-million dollar mansion on Auckland's exclusive Paritai Drive.

 

So after the Serious Fraud Office can find no case to make Mark Hotchin answer, yet another government department, the draconian Financial Markets Authority (FMA) can in a yet to be held civil case, keep this individual’s assets frozen for five years without trial. Justice this slow is not justice at all.

 

In one of my very first posts on Hotchin, four years ago now, I raised the nature of my disquiet over a state so powerful it can negate an individual’s rights like this:

 

Nothing attracted vitriol to my old blog Life Behind the IRon Drape more than the pieces I wrote on Mark Hotchin and Allan Hubbard (no relation). I may soon put them up again here, over December. For the coming one year anniversary I'm writing of is the freeze that was put on Mark Hotchin's assets over December, 2010. I have no idea whether Hotchin will be found wanting in respect of the laws of New Zealand, but he has now had his life frozen by the State for a year and not only has never been given the chance to defend himself in court, he's still not had a single charge laid against him.

To me, this denotes a State with far more power than I'm comfortable with, and no justice for the individual of Mark Hotchin, no matter what you think of him. The champagne thieving bureaucrats at the SFO need to charge Hotchin, or not, and give him his day in court (and unlike Mr Hubbard, don't make him have to sue to use his own money to defend himself). This isn't Putin's Russia, is it? It's New Zealand. Perhaps the difference is far less than we would all like to think.

 

Well the SFO didn’t charge him, they couldn’t make their case, so I guess that puts New Zealand firmly into Putin’s sphere rather than the Founding Fathers. Indeed those bullying statists of the Left take cynical glee in telling libertarians like myself we are utopian dreamers: and I agree, New Zealand is far closer to those big old state gulags, than to my fantasy of the free, civilised, prosperous Western society. We truly are in times when everything is tax avoidance, and everything is illegal, if that’s what the state decides, and where the God-like powers of departments like IRD above our privacy legislation are used to spy on citizens in programs that have nothing to do with the New Zealand tax take.

 

Finally, regarding Hotchin’s civil case in a year’s time, I repeat why that is not appropriate:

 

1) I contend the rule of law does not encompass the State taking a civil case, using taxpayer money, against Hanover. Surely this is outside the role of the State in a free country, as the losses borne are between Hanover and its investors: it's a private matter to those two parties, to be worked out through civil claims. The FMA should take no civil case for the same reason not one government should have bailed out one bank, and New Zealand should never have had legislated the Deposit Guarantee Scheme, with the disastrous unintended consequences it entailed. That is, just as the State and the Church were separated historically, to further the cause of freedom, so now must the state be separated from the economy and functioning of a free market, by which I mean, given the market is simply where individual needs and desires find their expression and resolution, separated from the lives of individuals, period.

2) My real concern, Mr Hotchin has had his assets frozen for over one [correction, four ]year[s] now, and still no criminal fraud charge has been laid, and prosecution of same would be the only appropriate role of state (which civil cases may well flow from). Nobody seems to have difficulty understanding that detention without trial is a practice that denotes the totalitarian State, not a state of freedom, well, how is Mr Hotchin having his life effectively frozen for over one year without a trial, or even a charge, any different (no matter what you might think of the man)? Does he get access to his funds to fight the State now in this civil case? Surely, even if it were legitimate the State take the civil case - it's not, but bear with me - then any criminal wrongdoing must be proven first?

 

Regarding that last, I repeat, no case for criminal wrongdoing could be made, so decide for yourself what sort of society that denotes, although I'll leave you the following words to ponder (hattip Sue@English_Woman:

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