Wealthy Auckland CBD landlords ‘mobilise’ against Heart of the City board after chief executive Viv Beck’s suspension

Wealthy Auckland CBD landlords have been “mobilising” to challenge Heart of the City’s fourth chairperson in six months – sending emails calling for his resignation and seeking a special general meeting to question the legitimacy of the business association’s board.

The Herald understands more than 60 Heart of the City (HOTC) members have signed a petition asking for a special general meeting to question the board.

Several of the landlords and business owners backing the petition have been closely tied to HOTC chief executive Viv Beck, who was suspended from her role in April.

The Herald understands one of these figures is property developer Andrew Krukziener, who bankrolled Beck’s 2022 Auckland mayoral campaign.

Another HOTC member pushing for the special general meeting is Greg Moyle – the Waitematā local board member who Beck had campaigned unsuccessfully to keep as the council liaison person overseeing HOTC funding decisions.

Moyle is also a business owner in the CBD and thus eligible for HOTC membership.

Moyle said he’s “certainly prepared to go out and try and get [the signatures off HOTC members] to force that issue”.

“It’s a real worry that our largest business association is in this sort of turmoil, and I don’t understand the reason why,” Moyle said.

“There seems to me to be a bit of a witch hunt against Viv … I don’t like bullies, and she’s been treated totally inappropriately.”

There are 15,000 businesses and commercial property owners within the HOTC boundary that pay a targeted rate, which generates slightly more than $5 million in annual budget.

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown wrote to HOTC in March with concerns about the agency’s governance.

The city centre business association then agreed to launch a governance review, engaged lawyers and ramped up its “financial oversight”.

The owner of St James Theatre on Queen St, Steve Bielby, has acted as a spokesman for a group of disgruntled HOTC members, who have been meeting over concerns with the new HOTC board’s agenda – even before Beck was stood down.

Last week, the Herald revealed that new HOTC chair Malcolm McCracken was elected in February despite Beck allegedly ringing several members of the nine-member board to convince them to vote for another member of the board as chair. Five of the board’s nine members were replaced at the association’s AGM in October.

Bielby says he asked HOTC to confirm that all the members of its board were eligible for their roles. Board members need to be HOTC members, for which they must be business owners or commercially rated property owners in the HOTC targeted rate boundary.

Beilby said HOTC needs to “clarify the status of the board” and whether all members are “currently in line with the [HOTC] constitution”.

Moyle echoed this sentiment, claiming several board members needed “to fall on their sword” because they were not business owners, thus not entitled to be there.

A special general meeting can be triggered after 5% of the HOTC full members request it.

“There’s definitely members mobilising. There is a frustration and a concern this isn’t being dealt with well. But it’s a hard situation, I acknowledge, to deal with if you’re dealing with some really quite confidential matters,” Bielby said of the HOTC governance review.

Beilby and another Auckland Council source told the Herald that HOTC members had expressed frustration with the lack of communication to members after Beck’s suspension.

“There’s just no information. What’s happening? Who’s been appointed an acting manager? I wouldn’t even know who to call at the moment,” Bielby said.

An executive committee (board) spokesperson confirmed a person could be a HOTC member in two ways: by owning a commercially rated property in the targeted rate area, or by being an occupier or tenant and operating a business in such a property.

“HOTC’s practice has been to take a broad interpretation of who can be members,” the spokesperson said.

“For example, ‘operating a business’ has not been interpreted to mean owning a business. It is sufficient to be carrying out business from a central city location. Likewise, we have accepted representatives of public and government institutions on this list, along with private business. For example, the Commerce Commission and the Auckland District Court are currently represented on the membership list.”

The spokesperson said the HOTC board was satisfied that the chair, McCracken, was a member by virtue of this second “operating” criterion. The HOTC executive committee intends to discuss the possibility of a special general meeting at its next board meeting.

The HOTC board is also able to proactively call a special general meeting, which they will discuss at their next board meeting. The HOTC spokesperson says this has been communicated to Bielby.

The Herald has also obtained several letters from irritated Auckland CBD landlords and business figures sent to McCracken after he said in a Spinoff article on February 18 that he would be further investigating concerns raised by politicians over HOTC.

In that article, Auckland Central MP Chloe Swarbrick said Beck had contributed to a media narrative that the CBD was full of “chaos and crime and knives and guns”. Swarbrick said Beck’s public messaging was “hugely detrimental to the city”.

These letters were sent to McCracken before Beck was stood down.

One, from someone who described themselves as one of the largest real estate owners in Auckland, told McCracken he had none of the relevant commercial real estate or retail experience needed to be HOTC chair.

Shortly after McCracken became the HOTC chair he left KPMG to take on a role as a Commissioner on the Independent Hearings Panel for Auckland Council Plan Change 120. The massive shake-up of the city’s planning rules will allow for greater density and high-rise apartments.

The large real estate owner said in his letter to McCracken: “I fear that your role is a political appointment and that you are seeking to pursue your own agenda … It seems astonishing and irresponsible that the board would have appointed such an inappropriate chair … I’m not confidence [sic] in your ability to represent HOTC and would ask that you stand down.”

Another letter from a chief executive to HOTC’s main email says McCracken has asked “Aucklanders to reject, in true Orwellian style, the evidence of their own eyes and ears” in allegedly ignoring the level of crime in the CBD.

The chief executive describes McCracken’s willingness to speak with people about HOTC’s allegedly negative messaging as “nonsense”, which McCracken should be “ashamed” of.

“Viv Beck seems to be the only person publicly standing up for all of us who live and work in the central city,” the person says.

Another business figure also expressed concern that the “new chair’s inexperienced and the fact he appears to have no commercial investment in property assets in the city”. They too said McCracken’s appointment needed “immediate reconsideration”, and suggested people with no property investments have no place on the HOTC board.

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In a statement this month, a spokesperson for the HOTC executive committee told the Herald the board was “united on the need for stronger governance”, which had been identified as an “urgent priority”.

The executive committee has set up an audit and finance committee to provide “greater and more detailed financial oversight”.

It has also undertaken an urgent update of board and governance processes, including engaging “independent external special counsel” to ensure board meeting processes, agendas, decisions and minutes were compliant “for the sake of transparency”. HOTC’s executive committee also agreed to an independent governance review.

Bielby says he hasn’t spoken to Beck, but says the “information void” from both the HOTC executive team and the board has caused huge angst among many members.

“Several members who came to me could have made this a bit more of a nuclear kind of thing.

“Just to try to calm it down, I’ve liaised with the board and written to them and said, ‘Look, I’ve just got some questions here’.”

In March, Bielby told the Herald the members he was speaking with were considering some form of legal challenge, such as a judicial review, if an HOTC special general meeting was not called.

At the time, he also defended Beck from criticism that her messaging was overly negative and that her campaigning for greater law and order dominated other priorities.

“This is an organisation that is especially there for those business owners. This isn’t the city centre residents’ group, this isn’t some of those other advocacy groups.

“Those very negative views definitely exist within the city and need hard conversations … [HOTC] is about addressing these confronting issues. The city centre is a hard place, it’s not puppies and rainbows the whole time.”

Beck and Krukziener were contacted for comment for this article.

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