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• that applicant’s employees
• employees of subsidiary/associate/parent companies
• immediate family members
• those with any pecuniary interest in the project

12. Consideration of all Eligible Applications

All applications meeting the relevant scheme’s criteria must be considered by the Board.

13. Appeals

The Minister is the appeal authority. In considering appeals the Minister will instruct the Ministry to evaluate each appeal and make a recommendation to him or her.

The relevant Board must comply with all requests by the Ministry for information relating to the processing of the application to which the appeal relates. The procedure to be followed is:

• Ministry to request relevant file from the relevant Board within 2 working days of appeal referral from the Minister;
• file to be submitted to the Ministry by the relevant Board within 5 working days of receipt of request;
• Ministry to draft Ministerial report within 5 working days of receipt of file and fax this to the relevant Board for comment;
• relevant Board to provide its written comments (by fax or post) within 5 working days of receipt of the draft report;
• Ministry to finalise report, taking Board’s comments into account, and forward report to the Minister within 2 working days of receipt of Board’s comments;
• advise relevant Board of Minister’s decision and return file within 5 working days of decision date.

Appeals will only be considered if they are received by the Minister within 2 months of the date of the relevant decision letter from the relevant Board; Boards must advise grant applicants of this timeframe in their decision letters.

14. Transfer of Grants

Boards are able to consider requests for the transfer of approved grants to another party. Boards have the same choice in terms of the decision making procedure they wish to follow for such requests as for the reallocation and time extension approvals. In approving such transfers Boards will need to obtain, in writing, the agreement of the original recipient to transfer to the new recipient and the new grant recipient’s written acknowledgement that the grant is accepted on its original conditions. A copy of the grant transfer approval will need to be sent to the Ministry along with the appropriate claim payment instruction.

15. Information on Grant Approvals

Information on grant approvals may be made publicly available by the Board. This covers: grant recipient; region; amount of grant; and a general statement on target area or activity assisted.

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This information may be made public anytime after the Board’s written approval. In addition, the outcome of the project or activity assisted can be made available six months after the final report has been received by the Board. Prior to that time requests for information will be dealt with under the Official Information Act.

16. Statistics on Applications

Each Board shall supply the Ministry with weekly statistical details on the number and value of BDIG, EAGS and EGDS applications submitted, approved, declined, on hand or withdrawn by applicants and details of undisbursed commitments. These statistics shall be broken down into 2 categories - applicants identifying themselves as Maori or under Maori ownership and those for non-Maori applicants. These statistics are to be further broken down by gender (all applications including those submitted by non-Maori) and tribal affiliations (where this information has been supplied.)

Within 5 working days of the end of each month each Board shall provide a copy of their Business Development Grant Scheme database, by disk, to the Ministry for the purposes of statistical analysis.

The Ministry’s minimum statistical requirements shall be met by Boards.

17. Business Development Investigation Grant

Scheme Philosophy

The BDIG scheme provides assistance to investigate the feasibility and/or viability of new projects. It does not provide assistance to establish businesses.

The overall aim of the scheme is to ensure that business ideas/proposals are thoroughly researched. Once an applicant has done this they should be better placed to obtain commercial funding to establish their business.

The scheme has been designed to stimulate innovative and economically viable businesses throughout New Zealand; businesses which will fully realise the potential of the resources and development opportunities of each region.

Assistance available

The scheme is available throughout New Zealand and offers 50 percent of approved investigation costs to a maximum grant of $20,000 per project; previous assistance under the now terminated New Business and Regional Development Investigation Grant schemes is to be taken into account in determining a project’s maximum grant.

Any individual, business or organisation resident in New Zealand and registered for either income tax or GST purposes (ie based in New Zealand for the purposes of tax) is eligible to apply.

Eligibility criteria

To be eligible for assistance, a project must meet two criteria:

1 It must be a lawful activity; and

NEW ZEALAND GAZETTE
6 AUGUST
2309