Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii
A police staffer who was asked to not circulate emails containing allegations about disgraced former Deputy Commissioner Jevon McSkimming "assumed" then Police Commissioner Andrew Coster would brief the Police Minister.
However, the Minister says it wasn't until almost nearly two years later that he was first informed of the allegations against McSkimming.
Why 36 emails containing allegations about McSkimming were diverted from Mark Mitchell's office to Coster's office without the Police Minister seeing them became one of the central questions to come following the scathing report by the Independent Police Conduct Authority in November.
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Protocol was to forward emails to police commissioner's office bypassing minister
A protocol had been put in place for police staff in Mitchell's ministerial office to forward the emails directly to then-Commissioner Andrew Coster's office, and not share them with Mitchell or his political staff, he said.
RNZ has obtained under the OIA a copy of a handwritten file note by Police's manager of Ministerial Services Lee Hodgson dated 17 January, 2024.
In the note Hodgson wrote that someone had brought some emails to her attention that they had come across in the minister's mailbox while clearing a backlog of correspondence.
"They related to anonymous allegations about Jevon."
Hodgson wrote that the staffer gave her h
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