A 53 year-old priest and former gay lover of ex-Labour MP Tim Barnett has been arrested for allegedly misappropriating over $500,000 from AUT University.
Jonathan Kirkpatrick, a former Dean of Dunedin’s St Paul’s Cathedral, has resigned as chief executive of the University's Business Innovation Centre after an internal investigation. He has since been arrested and charged over the alleged “accounting discrepancies” and appeared in Court last Thursday.
The NZ Herald reported that Kirkpatrick’s lawyer Russell Fairbrother stated in court that his client "took full responsibility for his actions" and indicated that Kirkpatrick would enter a plea to the charges at his next court appearance.
The discrepancies related to money in the research and development field, and the money is apparently not income derived from student fees. Despite this, University Vice-Chancellor Derek McCormack sent an email to the university's 26,000 students expressing AUT’s disappointment in the former staff member, and informing the students that the University will be doing everything within its power to recover the losses.
The alleged theft is not really a surprise to anyone, however, as AUT’s legendary inability to notice the fact that they put the word ‘university’ in their name twice means they were always fairly unlikely to notice a minor detail like someone stealing heaps of their money.
Critic spoke to an Otago University spokesperson, eager to find out if any staff members of our University had been done for embezzlement in recent times. However a University spokesperson told Critic that “no situation similar to that of the alleged misappropriation of funds at AUT University has occurred in recent years”.
If it’s not the altar boys or the sacramental wine, then its invariably AUT’s bank account
