Greyhound Racing New Zealand said today that the Government will enter unprecedented territory if it requisitions the organisation’s savings fund (currently $16m), built up over decades, as part of its intended ban of the sport.

GRNZ is an Incorporated Society, with funds held on behalf of participants in the sport.

Governments can only forcibly close and appropriate funds of an Incorporated Society for financial misconduct, insolvency or failure to submit returns.

GRNZ has operated impeccably and complied with all requests made of it. Therefore, the Government will need to pass a remarkable new law to close a Society that has done nothing illegal. The Government would need to declare what happens to the Society’s funds. It has been suspiciously silent on the matter to date.

GRNZ CEO Edward Rennell said a grab for money rightly owned by the sport and its participants would be contemptible.

“The Government will execute the sport on trumped up charges, and make us pay for the gallows and grave,” Rennell said.

“It is a real low point; the first Government to fabricate a new law to close an Incorporated Society that is totally compliant with all laws and standards. It’s a cavalier approach to law, justice and democracy.

“The Government is grinding its heel into our people by taking their money as well as their sport.

“Those funds were built up over decades by generations of sport participants. It belongs to them,” Edward Rennell said.

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Rennell predicts the Government would excuse the extraordinary theft as necessary to pay for rehoming greyhounds, but he says that the high cost arises from the Government’s ban, and insistence on a close-down faster than greyhounds can be rehomed, requiring long-term kenneling while they wait.

Rennell said the ban was unjustified, so at least should be carried out with impeccable fairness. Any ban must be cost-neutral, where the sport is wound down gradually, using profits and savings to cover costs and compensate participants for loss of assets.

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