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pass any matters of interest to the Prime Minister’s office in the Beehive — as Power’s office did on the mansion purchase.

There was another reason the Prime Minister’s assurances of ignorance over Dotcom were questioned. The tycoon’s chosen home at Coatesville meant he was a constituent in the Prime Minister’s Helensville electorate. Most MPs with electorate seats are likely to miss a new constituent moving into the area — there are about 70,000 people living inside the Helensville boundary — but it was different in Dotcom’s case. He was one of the few people to have won residency under a scheme promoted by the Prime Minister, and his arrival in New Zealand saw him move into one of the country’s most expensive homes with one of the nation’s biggest bank balances.

His arrival certainly brought attention in the neighbourhood, enough so that a number of those living nearby rang Key’s office to complain about the new resident and his fast cars scaring horses.

Contact with Key’s office happened again in August 2011. The rejection of the application to buy the mansion saw contracting staff there to seek out Key’s support to save Dotcom’s plan to buy the mansion. Two men representing the staff made their way to Key’s electorate office in the village of Kumeu, north of Auckland. They met with the electorate secretary, outlined their concerns and asked the Prime Minister be told. The men were contacted — not by Key but by Maurice Williamson’s office. The PM later said he was never told about the approach.

The Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ) had, by now, been given the responsibility of assisting the FBI. Detective Inspector Grant Wormald later said he was brought into the operation in August 2011 and the crime-fighting group’s involvement became deeper from then and drew in other New Zealand agencies. Wormald’s involvement — and particularly that of Ofcanz — is significant. It is not like any other part of the police. Diagrams showing reporting lines bring Ofcanz not under the sway of the Commissioner of Police but to a shadowy collection of critical government servants called O-Desk — the Officials Committee for Domestic and External Security Co-ordination (ODESC). The group operates out of the Department for Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), the institutional and non-political body which describes itself as providing the “constitutional and institutional glue” needed for New Zealand’s democracy to function. Rather than “glue”, the DPMC is the oil which allows the machinery of government to function. It contains bodies which are central parts to New Zealand’s intelligence infrastructure, including O-Desk. The formal job tasking for O-Desk is to “act on the Prime Minister’s behalf to exercise policy oversight of the New Zealand intelligence community in respect of foreign

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