Green bank boss’s pay rose as her job shrank to four staff

Pay is supposed to track responsibility. At New Zealand Green Investment Finance (NZGIF), it appears to be doing the opposite. Newsroom reports that chief executive Sarah Minhinnick is now on a $1.5m salary to wind up the fund, overseeing less money, fewer people and no new investments.

In the 2024-25 year, when NZGIF still had a functioning team, her total remuneration was $978,979, including a $949,645 base salary. If the Newsroom figure is right, that is a rise of more than $500,000 for a role that now manages a handful of staff and a shrinking book of assets.

The minister already flagged the smaller number

This is not a problem that snuck up on anyone. In March 2026, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts said a salary of nearly $1m for the head of a defunct Crown fund was “hard to justify” while many New Zealanders were struggling with living costs. Board chair David Woods defended the package at the time as in line with market benchmarks, and Watts noted the board, not the minister, sets chief executive pay.

By May, the minister was still calling it hard to justify. Five months later the figure has apparently climbed further. Either the board ignored a public signal from its shareholding minister, or there is an explanation nobody has bothered to make public.

There may be a defensible one. Retention and completion bonuses are standard in private-sector run-offs, because the person closing the doors has every reason to leave early. If that is what is going on, the board should say so, publish the hurdles and show what the payment buys. Leaving taxpayers to infer it is how a governance decision becomes a political gift.

A shell with a premium price tag

NZGIF’s own 2025-26 Statement of Performance Expectations, released in November 2025, said the fund did not intend to supply any output classes. Its targets were to cut to three or four staff by June 2026, keep operating costs within $6.8m, return $220m to the Crown and cancel $300m of uncalled shares.

Meanwhile The Post found the fund had spent $380,000 on office leases in Auckland and Wellington after the wind-down order, as headcount fell from 23 to four. Small sums against a balance sheet of this size, but they tell you how slowly the overheads have followed the mandate out the door.

The losses are the backdrop critics will reach for. NZGIF wrote off $113.3m on SolarZero and lost $8.7m in the management buyout of electric fleet financier Carbn Group. In fairness to Minhinnick, she started in August 2024, three months before SolarZero collapsed. That loss belongs to the investment decisions before her, not the clean-up.

The clean-up is actually working

This is what makes the pay decision so self-defeating. NBR reports the wind-down has returned over $500m to the Crown so far. Minhinnick told NBR the fund is a “required seller”, which inevitably means discounts. That is a fair explanation for selling assets below their best price. It is not an explanation for the salary.

The Government’s original rationale was sound. When Cabinet ordered the wind-down in April 2025, Watts said almost $400m had been invested with very limited results, and that more than 20 other government funds were chasing similar goals. Private capital and the emissions trading scheme can finance decarbonisation. A Crown bank duplicating them was hard to defend.

But a sound policy can still be badly executed, and voters do not distinguish between the two. Every headline like this one makes the next attempt at public climate finance, under any government, harder to sell. Critics will not say the board misread its remuneration framework. They will say green finance is a gravy train.

What the annual report needs to answer

The lesson for anyone governing a Crown entity in run-off is simple. Scope is shrinking, so pay should either shrink with it or come with a published, measurable reason why it does not. Completion milestones, a cap and a clear end date are not exotic requests.

Treasury’s document index lists a fresh NZGIF annual report for 2025-26, dated 15 October. That is where the board should set out exactly how the $1.5m is built, what targets it is tied to and when the final payment ends. The case for financing decarbonisation is not what is being discredited here. The case for how the state builds, staffs and dismantles its own institutions is, and the board can still fix that by showing its working.

Sources

• Newsroom: NZGIF CEO Sarah Minhinnick paid $1.5m salary to wind up Govt’s green bank (2026-10-22)
• The Post: Climate change minister says nearly $1m salary for head of defunct Crown-owned fund ‘hard to justify’ (2026-03-25)
• The Post: Green investment fund has spent $380k on office space since wind down directive (2026-05-31)
• The Treasury: NZGIF Annual Report 2024-2025 (2025-10-23)
• The Treasury: NZGIF Statement of Performance Expectations 2025-2026 (2025-11-20)
• Beehive: Government to wind down Green Investment Finance (2025-04-08)