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A High Court ruling for the Environment Court to reconsider awarding $450,000 in costs to Ngāti Manuhiri has resulted in the trust being awarded exactly the same amount.
Sand mining firm McCallum Bros Ltd (MBL) won an appeal in April against the high level of costs awarded to Manuhiri Kaitiaki Charitable Trust (MKCT), after losing its lengthy court bid to keep dredging off Pakiri and Mangawhai in April last year (MM, Apr 28).
High Court judge Justice Geoffrey Venning agreed with McCallum’s contention that MKCT, the operational arm of Ngāti Manuhiri Settlement Trust, should have provided invoices to back up its costs claim and ordered the Environment Court to reconsider.
However, in a 27-page decision released last Wednesday, June 18, Environment Court Judges Jeff Smith and Aidan Warren said now that MKCT had produced invoices to back its claims, they believed $450,000 was not only a reasonable, but a conservative contribution to the actual costs claimed of more than $801,000.
They stressed that those costs might not have been so high in the first place were it not for errors made by MBL, principally its incorrect claim that there had been no impact on the Pakiri area due to sand mining and miscalculating the amount of sand taken from the bay.
The judges also criticised MBL for relying on a section of the Resource Management Act that protected its right to continue inshore dredging until all court appeals had concluded.
“In our view, this was an abuse of the court process and was never the intention of the Act,” they said.
“While it might be legally permissible, it was clear that ongoing adverse effects to both Pakiri Beach and potentially to tara iti (fairy tern), a nationally endangered species, could occur during the continued abstraction of sand.”
The last-minute attempt by MBL to strike out MKCT’s case as irrelevant at the end of the original hearing also came in for criticism, with the judges saying it was “entirely misconceived”.
MBL also came under fire for requiring Ngāti Manuhiri to prove it was tangata whenua for the area south of Te Arai Point, something which MBL should have admitted from the outset, the judges commented.
“None of these factors are minor,” they said. “Some are of immense significance, particularly to MKCT.
We consider these factors taken together do justify a significantly increased costs award.”
