Americans are hardly the only ones to be served papers for legal cases. The owners of the Scenic Hotel Group, a hotel accommodations company in New Zealand, recently served the Labour Party leader Andrew Little with papers to begin defamation proceedings.
Scenic Hotel Group was founded in 1980 by American Earl Hagaman and his close friend Ralph Brown when Hagaman visited and immediately fell in love with New Zealand. Their first hotel was a 48-room inn on the West Coast of South Island, but they quickly grew and acquired other properties that now form a semicircle around the scenic South Island. When Brown suffered a fatal heart attack, Hagaman and his wife Lani continued growing the business in his honor, including with the construction of a boutique five-star property designed to mimic its natural surroundings.
Despite Scenic Hotel Group’s vast success in New Zealand, and their touching story, Labour leader Andrew Little has had some negative things to say about Earl Hagaman. In September 2014, Hagaman donated $101,000 to the National Party, and the following month his company was awarded a government contract to manage the Matavai Resort in Niue. Back in May 2015, LIttle said that Niue resort tender process “stunk to high heaven,” implying that Hagaman had bribed his way into the deal by donating money to the National Party. Little went as far as to demand that an investigation occur into the legality of the contract.
Hagaman and his wife asked for Little to retract his statement because “no one should be verbally attacked and denigrated because they believe in democracy, and the right to make their own unsolicited political choice on who they want to give a donation to. The decision to make the donation was completely unsolicited and was Earl’s personal decision and nothing to do with the Scenic Hotel business.” When Little didn’t apologize, the Hagamans filed a defamation lawsuit. However, Little has stood his ground and appears ready to fight the defamation case.
