The numbers that should embarrass the agency
New Zealand’s Active Investor Plus visa has been a headline success. In its first year, the programme attracted nearly $1.49 billion in investment and 635 applications covering 2,083 people. Immigration Minister Erica Stanford pointed to 573 applications totalling approximately $3.39 billion invested or committed in February, comparing it favourably to the 116 applications and $70 million under previous settings.
But strip away the headline figure and the distribution is damning. Only $19.6 million, or 1.4%, has gone to companies approved for direct investment. The rest has flowed into managed funds, with nearly $1 billion going to private credit funds alone as of August 2025.
For context, under earlier AIP settings as of April 2024, 44% of committed investment went into direct investments. The current 1.4% is not a gradual drift. It is a collapse.
Fund managers got the invitations, businesses got told there was no room
What makes today’s NZ Herald investigation significant is not the investment split itself, which has been reported before. It is the revelation that Invest NZ has been actively reinforcing the imbalance through its networking infrastructure.
The agency has hosted 17 networking events connecting golden visa applicants with New Zealand investment opportunities. At a San Francisco event in September 2025, the attendee list showed 15 representatives from fund management companies and zero companies approved for direct investment.
Multiple approved direct investment companies told the Herald they were informed there was insufficient space at events, or that companies seeking direct investment were simply not involved.
Alwyn Poole, CEO of Education 710+, an approved direct investment company, asked the obvious question: “If you meet the AIP requirements, why is Invest NZ picking and choosing who it connects to visa holders? And what is the basis on which they’re making their choices?”
Invest NZ’s acting AIP investments director Simone Robbers claimed the events are not designed to connect companies with investors. An explanation that raises the question of why 15 fund managers were in the room at an offshore event.
The platform that used to solve this problem got killed
The exclusion from events would matter less if companies had other routes to visibility. They used to. Invest NZ operated a ‘live deals’ platform that connected approved companies with prospective investors. It was shut down in October 2024 with little public explanation.
The Immigration NZ operational manual still references the platform. The platform itself is gone.
A structural conflict nobody is addressing
The government has partially acknowledged the problem. The Herald’s April investigation found that $172 million went into discretionary investment management services with funds sitting in bank accounts rather than being deployed. Stanford closed that loophole, stating: “This is not a golden ticket to come to New Zealand and leave your money in a bank account and get it back after three years.”
But closing one loophole while the agency responsible for the programme systematically excludes direct investment companies from its own events is not a fix. It is a contradiction.
Brent Burmester from the University of Auckland Business School put it plainly in April: “I don’t see anything in the design of this programme that ensures the investor shares strategic responsibility for the businesses boosted by their capital.”
What this means for businesses that thought they qualified
The MBIE Cabinet paper from December 2024 that authorised the redesign was explicit about the old scheme’s failure: only $48 million invested of a potential $874 million, with just 11 businesses receiving investment. The redesign was supposed to fix that.
Instead, Invest NZ has built an infrastructure that channels nearly all of the capital toward fund managers. Private Capital Group’s PCG NZ Debt Fund alone attracted approximately $350 million in the last year. The companies the programme was sold as serving are getting 1.4% of the total and being told there is no room at the table.
For any growth-stage New Zealand company that invested time and legal costs getting approved for direct AIP investment, the message from Invest NZ is clear: the programme exists, the money is real, but the agency running it has decided you are not the priority.
Sources
- NZ Herald: Invest NZ golden visa events under fire for favouring managed funds (2026-05-05)
- BusinessDesk: Golden visa residency cash mostly going to private credit and managed funds (2025-08-13)
- NZ Herald: Active Investor Plus visa cash rules under review amid idle funds concerns (2026-04-22)
- RNZ: Golden visa update announced by Immigration Minister (2026-02-13)
- Immigration New Zealand: Active Investor Plus Visa overview (2026-04-07)
- NZTE: Investor Migrant update – April 2024 (2024-05-15)
- Immigration NZ: Appendix 15 – Criteria for managed funds and direct investments (2025-08-17)
- B2B News: Active Investor Plus visa – $3.57B pipeline, most parked in funds (2026-04-21)