Radio host and Gore district councillor Rob ‘‘Caveman’’ McKenzie rents the second floor of a main street building for storage space.
On the floor is a safe, which was owned and locked by a previous tenant - O’Connell and Co.
The floor was home to accountant Gavin O’Connell’s office.
O’Connell was jailed in 1995 for 15 months on theft and fraud charges.
However, he died soon after - leaving the locked safe behind.
Curious, Mr McKenzie and his landlord paid a locksmith to open the safe.
The contents were revealed to be hundreds, maybe thousands, of financial documents.
These were the records of businesses in Gore O’Connell and Co had provided services to during the 1990s.
However, this begged the question of who was responsible for the documents, and what to do with them.
Mr McKenzie suggested giving the documents back to their rightful owners, but sources contacted by The Ensign gave conflicting opinions.
One suggested it was the responsibility of the estate, but another said the documents had to be destroyed as they were owned by the accountant, who could no longer relinquish ownership.
New Zealand Law Society property law section chairwoman Kristine King provided some much-needed clarification.
Although these documents sat in a murky no-man’s land of legality, there was no reason they could not be returned to whoever might wish to get them back, she said.
The documents belonged to the clients and it was ultimately up to them what to do with them. Good practice could be taking out a newspaper advertisement giving 30 days’ notice before the documents’ destruction.
‘‘Certainly for me, as a lawyer, if I had merged with an old practice and we opened up a safe, we’d be duty bound to at least take steps to try to notify the owners.’’
In today’s age, it could be as easy as an email, and Mr McKenzie said if anyone was curious about old files from a family business to contact him.
