The man who gave Greens co-leader James Shaw his biggest career break has just delivered Shaw one of his biggest slapdowns: “I believe it should be a matter of justifiable public interest to know whether the qualifications which office-holders state they hold, do in fact exist.”
For nearly two weeks the Climate Change minister Shaw has steadfastly resisted requests for a privacy waiver so the circumstances of his MSc degree from the UK’s Bath University can be fact-checked – but one of Shaw’s biggest supporters has delivered a crushing blow to his former protege, saying it’s time to front up.
Jermyn Brooks was a managing global partner of accounting and auditing giant Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) who hired a then 24 year old Shaw on secondment from international NGO AIESEC to help PWC work on sustainability issues in the late 1990s.
AIESEC, which Shaw’s LinkedIn page says he is still an office-holder in, is still clinging to the false belief that Shaw graduated with a BA degree from Victoria University.
He described their work as “valuable” to PWC but doesn’t recall checking the degree status of the AIESEC recruits.
“I was never aware what degree James Shaw had actually been awarded,” he says, as “this was not key to the limited assignment which he and other AIESEC colleagues were working on.”
However, a 1999 report in Fast Company magazine says Shaw was able to leverage the temporary secondment into a permanent job at PWC.
A search of the UK PWC website in the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) reveals full time staff were expected to hold degrees, and not just any old BA: honours were expected.
However, efforts to find out how Shaw landed the rare privilege of a full time job at a Big-4 accounting firm without a degree of any kind were fruitless, the media team at global auditing powerhouse PWC says it doesn’t have the records.
For James Shaw and the New Zealand media, it’s been four weeks of social media hell since the story first broke that Shaw’s financial interest declarations to parliament were inaccurate and that his statement to parliament about co-founding UK consulting firm Future Considerations Ltd may have been misleading, as the company was founded in 2002, Shaw didn’t start working there until 2005 and he didn’t become a shareholder until 2007.
The New Zealand media, all over other candidate claims like a rash, studiously looked the other way as the Shaw scandal burned up social media. Then, three weeks ago, came the revelation that Shaw’s LinkedIn page carried a false statement that he had a BA from Victoria University when in fact he had dropped out and never finished it.
It was revealed that some journalists had been fooled into believing he had that degree.
