Businesswoman who was stalked tells MPs: ‘I felt very alone and desperate’

Thursday, 23 May 2024

Auckland company director Susan Templeton is calling on MPs to protect the privacy and safety of company directors.

A company director who felt forced to break the law to keep her home address off the Companies Office’s public register after being stalked, told MPs the country needed to make things harder for identity thieves and stalkers.

Auckland businesswoman Susan Templeton told the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee of how she was persecuted by a man with a history of violence towards her.

He tracked down her home address by searching her up on the public Companies Register, she said.

Templeton was speaking in support of the Companies (Address Information) Amendment Bill, a private member’s bill from Labour MP Deborah Russell, but originally drafted by former Labour MP Sarah Pallet.

The bill would give people fearing violence against them the ability to have the Companies Office keep their home addresses off the Companies Register.

“We’re making identity theft, stalking and harassment much too easy, and we need to make things much more difficult for criminals,” Templeton told MPs.

Susan Templeton tells her story to convince MPs to let company directors keep their home addresses off the Companies Office register.

“As a single business woman I have learned to be very careful guarding my privacy,” she said, however, the Companies Register made that very hard.

It was a lonely fight to protect herself, she told MPs.

“I felt very alone and desperate about the situation,” she said.

“I had break-ins. I had close calls on the street. I had phone calls at all hours, which I blocked. Texts. Each time I filed a police report, I received an email with a file number. That’s it. No-one ever called to inquire about my safety,” she said.

The Companies Office denied her request to take her address off the publicly-searchable register, so she took the law into her own hands, and when she moved home, she did not change her residential address.

Eventually, after her perpetrator identified himself as a man who had defrauded and violently assaulted her before, she secured a permanent protection order in court against the man, finally meeting Companies Office threshold to have her home address taken off the Companies Register.

Ironically, her perpetrator had been using false names on the Companies Office, but the Companies Office had no way of checking that, she told MPs.

“He was using the Companies Office as a front to create a sense of legitimacy for his businesses,” she said.

“I think we are very naive about the risks of stalking and cybercrime,“ she told MPs.

There were only three items of information needed to commit identity theft, she said.

Labour’s Ginny Anderson has just drafted a private members’ bill to make to make stalking a crime after the murder of 21-year-old Farzana Yaqub.

“Two of them are on my director page listing online.”

It was time home addresses were no longer published on the register, she said.

She suggested all directors have to submit to police checks once a year, to raise red flags for Companies Office investigators about people with criminal records.

Templeton is not the only company director who wants home addresses kept private.

The Institute of Directors’ annual sentiment survey of the mood of the boardroom has catapulted the stalking and harassment concerns of directors back onto the political agenda.

Being able to keep their home addresses off the register topped the list of personal concerns for directors in the institute’s survey – supported by 44% of directors, and 61% of directors on high-profile NZX-listed companies.

A director’s home address is currently one of the pieces of information the public, and regulators, can use to identify and track directors.

However, in other jurisdictions, including Australia, director identification numbers were issued to directors to ensure the public could discover which, and how many, boards a director served on without needing to cross-reference their home addresses, said Patterson.

The Australian government identified in September 2017 that ID numbers were a way of preventing businesspeople, both local and foreign, from using tactics such as multiple aliases, or different spellings of their names, to obscure the full extent of their business dealings.

In 2016, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment concluded director IDs were a good idea for similar reasons, but while Australia moved quickly to implement them, New Zealand has not.