I’m taking requests, and, not naming names, I’ve been gently nudged into looking at Trillian Trust. I was somewhat surprised to find on my computer a file, spreadsheets and a few years analysed. Then I remembered I had started to look at them, but felt there wasn’t enough data to be interesting. They restructured into a different entity in 2020 and took their previous grants off their website. Now we have four years of complete data. I’ve downloaded their newer data off their website, cleaned it up and classified it by sector / subsector and region.
So who is Trillian Trust? At the top there are five men making the grant decisions. Below copied from their authorised purpose: my highlights added.
Interesting what is missing: that’s a reference to returning grant monies to the areas they were generated from. This is somewhat addressed in the FAQ (copied):
Trillian Trust endeavour to return as much funds as possible into the area in which those funds were raised, however, funding is also provided to organisations that operate nationally.
As at the end of December 2024 Trillian Trust were managing 22 venues: 14 in Auckland, two venues in Thames Coromandel and one venue in Carterton, the Far North, Hamilton, Manawatu, Napier and Christchurch. This is up two venues from 2020.
Last financial year (31 July 2024) they gave away around $14 million, down a wee bit ($700k) from 2023, but up from (Covid affected) 2021 when the number was a little shy of $9m.
Where does the money go to? 62% of Trillian’s funding goes to Sport. Almost 8% goes to education: although of course a fair bit of this education support will go to sport, but, unless there is an underlying club for the school’s sport team, its impossible to classify into the correct bucket.
So who is Trillian Trust? At the top there are five men making the grant decisions. Below copied from their authorised purpose: my highlights added.
- Promotion of any amateur sport where that sport is conducted for the recreation of the general public. This includes, but is not limited to, the provision of ground fees, equipment and uniforms for amateur sporting clubs and teams. No donations and/or payments to professional sports people.
- Donations for cultural educational purposes that are of a non-commercial nature.
- Donations for educational advancement through grants to schools or other educational institutes for equipment or the development of better student amenities not covered by government funding, including playground equipment etc.
- Donations to recognised charitable organisations to further the objects of those groups.
- Promoting, controlling, and conducting race meetings under the Racing Act 2003, including the payment of stakes, and the provision and maintenance of public amenities primarily used for race meetings.
Interesting what is missing: that’s a reference to returning grant monies to the areas they were generated from. This is somewhat addressed in the FAQ (copied):
Trillian Trust endeavour to return as much funds as possible into the area in which those funds were raised, however, funding is also provided to organisations that operate nationally.
As at the end of December 2024 Trillian Trust were managing 22 venues: 14 in Auckland, two venues in Thames Coromandel and one venue in Carterton, the Far North, Hamilton, Manawatu, Napier and Christchurch. This is up two venues from 2020.
Last financial year (31 July 2024) they gave away around $14 million, down a wee bit ($700k) from 2023, but up from (Covid affected) 2021 when the number was a little shy of $9m.
Where does the money go to? 62% of Trillian’s funding goes to Sport. Almost 8% goes to education: although of course a fair bit of this education support will go to sport, but, unless there is an underlying club for the school’s sport team, its impossible to classify into the correct bucket.
Sport breakdown? Wow these guys love football! I guess this isn’t news.
Value |
2021 |
2022 |
2023 |
2024 |
TOTAL |
Football |
2,165,059 |
1,867,981 |
2,772,183 |
2,294,155 |
9,099,377 |
Rugby Union |
412,819 |
1,108,957 |
756,168 |
787,961 |
3,065,904 |
Rugby League |
656,305 |
533,672 |
493,234 |
210,008 |
1,893,219 |
Basketball |
350,140 |
400,239 |
468,421 |
386,252 |
1,605,053 |
Cricket |
232,942 |
129,182 |
758,591 |
389,111 |
1,509,836 |
Hockey |
300,006 |
267,708 |
441,526 |
423,245 |
1,432,485 |
Boating |
125,935 |
156,244 |
281,894 |
619,422 |
1,183,495 |
Venue |
221,999 |
314,024 |
298,154 |
339,761 |
1,173,938 |
Horse Racing |
40,000 |
244,650 |
445,238 |
314,000 |
1,043,888 |
Other Sport |
1,081,788 |
1,296,836 |
2,428,238 |
2,840,633 |
7,647,494 |
Total Sport |
5,586,993 |
6,319,491 |
9,143,647 |
8,604,548 |
29,654,680 |
We have some history with a Martin van Beynen piece on Stuff in 2022. Martin did a great job of pulling some of the strands together with relationships of top football club Auckland City FC, Central United and Trillian Trust. So which are the football clubs getting Trillian’s support? 44% of that footie money has gone to clubs associated with Auckland City Football Club. (Note Super City Youth is a now dissolved entity – see this article for more).
Auckland City FC’s income looks largely the same as when Martin van Beynen looked at it. You can check out their accounts on Societies, but that will show you they have an income of just over $1.1m. Granted.govt.nz tells me that Trillian are pretty much the only funder of this club. And their own website tells me they have a whole 12 teams and membership of 400. So looking at this: In 2024 Trillian subsided each team to the tune of $52k. Each member to the tune of $1,576. They have wages of $852k. Heck – when my husband was running a footie club we had about the same number of teams and members – all funded on subs (curiously a line item not on Auckland City FC’s accounts!) and a bit of support from a generous sponsor. Nary a salary in sight.
I’m not going to repeat the analysis here, but I did benchmark a year or two ago. The club in the Mainland Football catchment with the most pokie subsidy was Nelson Suburbs at a $5,078 subsidy per team over 47 teams. I reckon the lead in the van Beynen article still stands: Auckland City FC is New Zealand's top amateur club. Yet it can't shake the rumours that it's in fact a club of professionals masquerading as amateurs. I also think NZ Football needs to figure out a better operating model for its top clubs.
Anyhoo – back to Trillian Trust. The clean was pretty simple as there were many rows of the same entity. Below I have looked at the top ten organisations by number of grants. Trillian have no limits on the number of times you can apply.
I’m not going to repeat the analysis here, but I did benchmark a year or two ago. The club in the Mainland Football catchment with the most pokie subsidy was Nelson Suburbs at a $5,078 subsidy per team over 47 teams. I reckon the lead in the van Beynen article still stands: Auckland City FC is New Zealand's top amateur club. Yet it can't shake the rumours that it's in fact a club of professionals masquerading as amateurs. I also think NZ Football needs to figure out a better operating model for its top clubs.
Anyhoo – back to Trillian Trust. The clean was pretty simple as there were many rows of the same entity. Below I have looked at the top ten organisations by number of grants. Trillian have no limits on the number of times you can apply.
So Blue Light Ventures fill in 25 applications per annum. Tino Rawa restore wooden boats: quite lovely but Trillian is THE ONLY funder of this entity. This is feasible, but this pokie doesn't disclose conflicts so its a challenge to understand the why of these grant patterns.
I spent too much of my summer preparing a database for a wee database I was hoping the DIA would pick up to give them some better information to proactively manage risks. They don’t know who actually owns the venues which house the pokies. So I plodded through the 1,100 or so venues, figured out who owns them through a search of MoJ's (incomplete) database of liquor licenses, or MPI’s (much better) database of food licenses. I then searched up every commercial entity to see who were the directors / shareholders of said entities within the past decade or so. I captured that in a spreadsheet, and try to keep it up to date as I have all the commercial entities on a Companies Office watch list. Really need better hobbies.
I then intend to search all the humans on the list to see their interests. Under the legislation, venues cannot have a say in where funding goes. But, despite several complaints, I haven’t seen a behaviour change in the way grant money is allocated, so assume that its all good.
I spent about an hour or so looking for some linkages here. Here’s one. A chap who is an owner / shareholder of a Trillian Trust pub. Very strong ties to Auckland City FC AND Central United FC, who together in the last 4 years got almost $3.6m from Trillian. Oh – and he was a former director / shareholder of the now defunct Super City Football Academy – an entity that, according to Granted.govt.nz received $792k solely from Trillian in the years 2019 – 2022. To be clear, I’m not saying there is a situation where the venue is influencing where the grants go. But its probably worth a look.
The other thing I noticed about Trillian was some money ending up down south. You probably noticed that Horse Racing appears on the “most funded sport” list. Below is a pie chart looking at the locations for that funding. Trillian only has one South Island venue, in Christchurch. They did have one in Tasman in 2021, but that’s nowhere near Winton. There is nothing in their Authorised Purposes to say that they give back to where the funds are generated, but I can’t understand why they felt the needs of nine Southland harness racing clubs which do not operate nationally (and why they bothered to apply) outweighed the needs of organisations operating in the area their venues are situated.
I spent too much of my summer preparing a database for a wee database I was hoping the DIA would pick up to give them some better information to proactively manage risks. They don’t know who actually owns the venues which house the pokies. So I plodded through the 1,100 or so venues, figured out who owns them through a search of MoJ's (incomplete) database of liquor licenses, or MPI’s (much better) database of food licenses. I then searched up every commercial entity to see who were the directors / shareholders of said entities within the past decade or so. I captured that in a spreadsheet, and try to keep it up to date as I have all the commercial entities on a Companies Office watch list. Really need better hobbies.
I then intend to search all the humans on the list to see their interests. Under the legislation, venues cannot have a say in where funding goes. But, despite several complaints, I haven’t seen a behaviour change in the way grant money is allocated, so assume that its all good.
I spent about an hour or so looking for some linkages here. Here’s one. A chap who is an owner / shareholder of a Trillian Trust pub. Very strong ties to Auckland City FC AND Central United FC, who together in the last 4 years got almost $3.6m from Trillian. Oh – and he was a former director / shareholder of the now defunct Super City Football Academy – an entity that, according to Granted.govt.nz received $792k solely from Trillian in the years 2019 – 2022. To be clear, I’m not saying there is a situation where the venue is influencing where the grants go. But its probably worth a look.
The other thing I noticed about Trillian was some money ending up down south. You probably noticed that Horse Racing appears on the “most funded sport” list. Below is a pie chart looking at the locations for that funding. Trillian only has one South Island venue, in Christchurch. They did have one in Tasman in 2021, but that’s nowhere near Winton. There is nothing in their Authorised Purposes to say that they give back to where the funds are generated, but I can’t understand why they felt the needs of nine Southland harness racing clubs which do not operate nationally (and why they bothered to apply) outweighed the needs of organisations operating in the area their venues are situated.
If we look at all their grants, Auckland does get the lions share of their available funding: around 83% of total Trillian Trust funding goes to Auckland entities.
I write about this stuff as believe that as need to understand where funding comes from, where it goes, and how it gets there. No one else seems all that interested. As a citizenry we allow both those supplying money and those asking for money to operate, and as a community we need to ensure we have oversight over the organisations they choose to fund. Love to talk with you if you think this is at all interesting, and if you want to dive into the data a bit more than happy to do so. Check out my website http://www.delfi.co.nz/
I write about this stuff as believe that as need to understand where funding comes from, where it goes, and how it gets there. No one else seems all that interested. As a citizenry we allow both those supplying money and those asking for money to operate, and as a community we need to ensure we have oversight over the organisations they choose to fund. Love to talk with you if you think this is at all interesting, and if you want to dive into the data a bit more than happy to do so. Check out my website http://www.delfi.co.nz/
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