26 June 2026
More than 15 years after the 2010 Pike
River coal mine disaster in New Zealand, there are
indications that police may be close to announcing whether
or not criminal charges will be laid for actions leading up
to the underground explosions, which killed 29
workers.
Last week, Christopher Harder, a former
criminal lawyer working with some of the families of the
victims, publicly urged police to widen the scope of their
investigation. Before making a final decision on charges, he
called on police to investigate the unlawful agreement
reached in 2013 between the state and Pike River Coal’s
chief executive Peter Whittall, which resulted in charges
against Whittall for breaches of health and safety laws
being dropped.
Successive governments, state
regulators and the judicial system have prevented anyone
from being held accountable, despite abundant evidence that
Pike River Coal broke numerous laws and the mine was
effectively a gas bomb waiting to explode. A 2012 Royal
Commission of Inquiry found that the company had placed
production ahead of safety and ignored multiple warnings of
dangerous gas levels. The mine was poorly ventilated, had
grossly inadequate methane gas monitoring systems, and no
emergency exit as required by law.
Speaking with
podcaster Duncan Garner on June 17, Harder explained that he
had held 15 conversations with a senior police officer,
Detective Inspector Grant Wormald, between mid-2024 and
mid-2025. Harder decided to release a summary of these
discussions and to speak publicly about them after learning
that Wormald was no longer in charge of the Pike River
investigation.
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Harder told Garner that he was
concerned that police were close to making final decisions
without properly considering how the previous prosecution of
Whittall in 2013 was stifled. This was the main subject of
his discussions with Wormald. In any new trial of Whittall,
Harder said, the dropping of charges 13 years ago would
likely be raised.
In December 2013 the state regulator
WorkSafe agreed to withdraw the charges in exchange for a
payment of $3.41 million made by an unnamed insurance
company on behalf of Whittall and Pike River Coal’s board
of directors to the families of the disaster victims. The
deal was accepted based on legal advice from
Solicitor-General Michael Heron KC—advice which has never
been made public.
This agreement was denounced by the
families as “blood money” and in 2017 it was ruled
“unlawful” by the Supreme Court. Yet none of the lawyers
or state officials involved faced any consequences and the
charges against Whittall were not reinstated.
Speaking
with Garner, Harder quoted from an email he had uncovered,
which he had raised with Wormald. The email was sent by
Crown Solicitor Brent Stanaway, acting for WorkSafe, to
Whittall’s lawyer Stuart Grieve at 8.41 a.m. on December
6, 2013. It stated that “we now have a concluded
arrangement as to the dismissal of the charges against Mr
Whittall, which includes the public interest consideration
of a payment of $3.4 million to the 29 Pike River men who
died and 2 survivors.”
The email is significant
because it appears to contradict what Judge Jane Farish said
in open court on December 12, 2013, when she announced that
the prosecution of Whittall would not proceed. The judge
stated that Whittall was not “buying his way out of a
prosecution.” She said “the decisions that have been
reached today [the payment and the dropping of charges] have
been reached by two discrete processes” and told the Pike
River families that “this is not some behind-the scenes
deal that has gone on.”
Harder explained to Garner
that Judge Farish issued a minute on May 10, 2022, which
said that her ruling reflected what she discussed in a
chambers hearing on December 10, 2013, with both Stanaway
and Grieve.
“That is the problem,” Harder said.
“On the one hand, the court was told enough for Judge
Farish to conclude that the payment and the withdrawal of
charges were separate and discrete matters. On the other
hand, a document concealed from every court for more than 11
years records what appears to be a ‘concluded
arrangement’ involving both dismissal of the charges and
payment of $3.4 million.”
In his discussions with
Wormald and the interview with Garner, Harder also drew
attention to other correspondence between the two lawyers.
Harder contends that an email sent by Grieve to Stanaway
initially on October 16, 2013, proposing the deal to drop
the charges, was altered multiple times to make the deal
appear lawful. Harder said the final version of the email
was dated October 16 and saved under a filename consistent
with that date, 13-10-16 L2.Stanaway.pdf, even though it had
actually been created or altered on December 6.
On
December 6, 2013, Whittall’s lawyer Grieve redrafted the
email with a new clause requiring the Pike River families to
“counter-sign letters” acknowledging that the $3.41
million was “made on behalf of the Company’s directors
and officers in recognition of harm arising directly or
indirectly from the explosions or any subsequent events
arising from those explosions.”
Stanaway replied
that this was unacceptable to WorkSafe. He wrote to Grieve:
“While I understand there may be other conditions for the
insurers now, any variation in the arrangement… will not
be acceptable.” A third version of the letter was created
without the clause.
The exchange raises questions:
What exactly were the conditions that the insurance company
was demanding? Was it seeking to limit its liability and/or
prevent further legal action by the families?
The
identity of the insurer has not been made public. It has
never been explained why, and under what policy, an insurer
agreed to pay $3.41 million to stop Whittall from going on
trial. The company’s own insurance was exhausted. A few
months earlier, in July 2013, Pike River Coal was fined for
health and safety violations and ordered to pay $3.41
million in reparations to the families, but the company was
bankrupt and its receivers said there was only enough to pay
each family $5,000.
Harder, in his discussions with
Wormald, raised the possibility that another company linked
to Pike River mine provided the $3.41 million via a separate
insurance policy.
Bernie Monk, whose son Michael was
killed in the Pike River mine, told the WSWS he was visited
last week by police on June 18 and informed that they were
close to announcing a decision on whether or not to
prosecute people over the disaster. “They didn’t say yes
or no, and they didn’t say who they were or weren’t
going to [prosecute],” but a police officer told Monk that
“not all people will be happy” with the
decision.
Monk said he had urged police not to blame
the explosion on the workers who died. He noted that the
Royal Commission found that in the 48 days leading up to the
disaster there were “more than 40 times that the mine
could have exploded” because of high gas levels and the
company “didn’t do anything about it.” He said
subsequent investigations had identified problems with the
electricity supply to the mine, which may have contributed
to the explosions.
Monk said he was concerned that
police were not taking the issues raised by Harder seriously
because the 2013 deal “opens too many cans of worms”
about the justice system itself. He noted that despite the
2017 Supreme Court finding that the dropping of charges
against Whittall was unlawful, “nothing happened” as a
result.
The Pike River disaster implicates the
company’s management, the state regulators who allowed the
mine to operate, and successive governments that dismantled
the specialist mines inspectorate. Any trial of Whittall or
other senior company figures could also expose the role of
the trade union bureaucracy. The Engineering, Printing and
Manufacturing Union (EPMU, now called E tū) had about 70
members at Pike River, knew about the dangerous conditions
underground, but kept quiet and did nothing to stop its path
to disaster.
EPMU leader Andrew Little—who is now
mayor of Wellington—defended Pike River Coal in the
aftermath of the explosions. He also played a key role, as
Minister for Pike River Re-entry, in the last Labour
Party-led government’s decision to abort the underground
investigation of the mine.
The Labour Party promised
in its 2017 election campaign to re-enter the mine to
retrieve the 29 bodies and gather evidence for prosecutions.
Police reopened an investigation into the disaster in 2018.
In 2021, however, Minister Little claimed that the re-entry
had become too expensive. The operation was aborted—in the
face of opposition from the families and mining
experts—before investigators could reach crucial evidence
in the mine workings, such as the underground fan, which may
have sparked the first explosion.
The Pike River
disaster and the decade-and-a-half-long cover-up has
revealed that every capitalist institution—the
parliamentary parties, regulators, unions, and the judicial
system—upholds the interests of the rich and shields the
corporate elite from accountability.
By Tom Peters,
Socialist Equality Group
26 June 2026
Original url:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/06/26/ueep-j26.html
