Lali Media Group, which looked after sales, printing and distribution of the Taimi o Tonga, went under just before Christmas, after years of indebtedness to the Inland Revenue Department. The IRD applied successfully to the High Court at Auckland for the company to be wound up, and PricewaterhouseCoopers has been appointed as liquidator.
The paper is printed in New Zealand and circulated in Tonga, Australia, Hawaii and the U.S. mainland and gained international attention in 2003 when it was officially banned in the kingdom for its “seditious” content. Customs officers were seizing copies of the paper at the border and possession of it was deemed an offence.
The paper’s editor in chief and publisher, Kalafi Moala, who was jailed in Tonga in 1996 for an editorial he wrote, confirmed the company had not paid its tax bill in New Zealand because of “management failures.”
He said the amount owed had climbed to about $350,000 because of “humongous” compounding interest. The company had reduced the bill to about $150,000 and had asked the IRD if it could pay that in installments but it refused.
“I think there was a breakdown in communication; letters were sent to our office but no one was there to clear them. I was living in Tonga and before I knew it I got informed we were liquidated. We didn’t go to the court hearing because we didn’t know there was one.”
Moala, a U.S. citizen, had been living in exile in Auckland for more than a decade, but about three years ago he moved his publishing operation to San Francisco, where there is a large Tongan population, and then back to Nuku’alofa.
The paper will continue to be published out of Tonga but a thriving newsroom that was run out of a converted garage in the Auckland suburb of Penrose and consisting of eight reporters has now been reduced to one Auckland contractor looking after news, sales and distribution.
Lali Media Group, which also published the Indian Tribune, had no real assets besides office equipment, Moala said, and no other debts besides that owed the IRD.
Moala said the Taimi o Tonga itself was owned by a Tongan-registered company, Taimi Media Network, and would continue to be published.
Content would be e-mailed from Tonga to Horton Media in Auckland for printing, and distribution would be handled by a new company, Taimi Ltd, registered in New Zealand in the name of Moala’s wife and daughter.
Moala said the paper’s circulation had dropped from 20,000 to around 12,000. “It’s been tough times, we’ve got more competition.
There was a time when we were the only Tongan newspaper, now we’ve got two or three others.”
Moala said since the paper was banned in 2003, new media laws, a new king and new government ministers had changed things greatly. “We’re getting what we’ve been fighting for all this time.”
