The men who sold the world
I think they should go join another club, because they’re never going to be happy.
Auckland Trotting Club president and cheap watch salesman Jamie MacKinnon’s view about members who take an interest in the affairs of their club, and ask simple questions about the disappearance of huge swathes of cash
Rod Croon is the CEO of the Auckland Club.
He is also a con man and a spiv.
Croon told club members at the AGM a few weeks ago that the club had the right to do whatever they wanted with the NZ Harness Racing Hall of Fame.
“We own it!” Croon declared, claiming that the legendary former president Noel Taylor’s $650,000 loan to build the Hall had been repaid.
It was a lie of course..
Noel Taylor’s loan never had to be repaid.
As stated in his will, it was a gift to the sport he loved, from him.
Croon lied about there being a “rift” between ATC members and Hall Of Fame members too.
The truth is that the custodians of the taonga (treasure) from the ATC in 2010 formed a Hall of Fame trust to ring fence the assets that they’d been entrusted to protect from the club and clowns who run it.
The reason was that the then treasurer Norm Latimer – a very wise man – was as worried as hell about the club being investigated by the Department Of Internal Affairs over a dodgy scam that sent profits from poker machines funnelled back to the club through front companies. The scheme had been put into receivership, and the Thames, Manukau, Kumeu and Franklin clubs had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, so Norm was quite rightly concerned that Hall Of Fame’s assets could be frozen, or worse, confiscated, and they would lose the lot.
So the HOF founders said FU to Auckland, and their assets have been owned and managed by the trust ever since, thank God, because the ATC owes the banks at least $73 million, and are up for ongoing interest of more than $500,000 a month.
Good onya Rod and Jamie.
Financial geniuses you pair are.
Board member Robert Dunn, the dodgy trainer with multiple doping convictions who is also a member of the board of the control body HRNZ, reckons a whole lot of the history held in the Hall should be dumped, claiming that “a of stuff doesn’t need to be there.”
Well let’s be straight, Dunn doesn’t need to be there either, and shouldn’t be because he’s a crook with huge conflicts of interest, all his own.
How about this one?
The club has lost a lot of its car parks through having to sell most of the rest of its land to stop foreclosure by the banks?
So now it has to knock down the Hall to build car parking.
What a load of bollocks.
They are going to sell the lot.
The Hall, the track, the stand, the buildings, everything.
Mackinnon, Croon and their mates have fucked it all up, and the whole thing is goneburger.
The Hall, the track, the stands, the buildings, the lot.
Going, going, gone.
Do you really reckon they are going to build a new training track to replace Pukekohe?
Do you really believe the club is going to get a long term lease as a condition of sale of the land?
Well aren’t you a moron then.
No-one sells their house without a plan or anywhere to go to. they’d be mad; but that is exactly what Croon, Mackinnon and co are doing.
FFS, they only snagged the land 7 years ago by conning members of both clubs to merge, on the promise of a $6 million upgrade to Pukekohe if they voted yes.
The members voted yes.
The upgrade never came true.
Con men’s promises never do.
I’ve said it a million times, and I will say it again.
Someone needs to call in the Fraud Squad.
These tens of millions of dollars that are missing from the club’s accounts cannot be properly explained.
Show us the money boys.
Where is it?
Editor’s note – This story is an adaptation of a better one written by Barry Lichter. We thank the Doctor for his tacit ‘yours in harness racing’ permission to use it as a basis for ours.