A life of lurks and lies

Steve Kilgallon reports on the strange world of bankrupt, banned and now jailed real estate agent Aaron Drever.

When the Auckland District Court convened to pass sentence on Aaron Drever on July 15, he wasn’t there. His date with justice had already been deferred eight times. Now, it was nine, with his lawyer, Ron Mansfield, QC, left to explain that Drever had apparently caught Covid . . . again.

The judge, Evangelos Thomas, observed wearily: ‘‘Not many people get it for a third time.’’ He demanded Drever turn up with a PCR test next time he was in court. ‘‘He’s not the most honest person in the world.’’

The judge was right to be suspicious. It turned out to be just another dodge in a career of lurks and lies for the bankrupted and banned real estate agent. That same night, Drever was photographed on stage at the Pt Chevalier RSA, drawing the raffle winners (he denies this, despite photographic evidence).

But justice arrived yesterday, when Drever was sentenced to two years, two months imprisonment for obtaining by deception, forgery and dishonestly using a document. He still awaits court on another six charges relating to operating a business while bankrupt, which he denies (‘‘we will win that,’’ he reckoned). Even on the eve of his sentencing, Drever had hoped and expected to avoid jail, saying: ‘‘I wouldn’t be surprised if there is another twist to this story.’’

Drever has left a decade-long trail of destruction – first, his own real estate career, then a butchery franchise, a high-end supermarket, a chain of fish and chip shops, a bowling club and a speedway track.

It could all have worked very differently, for he had charm, brains and a particular skill in selling houses. ‘‘He was a legend,’’ observes fellow real estate agent Eric Chase. ‘‘He would have been a multimillionaire: he was brilliant.’’

There was a time in the early 2010s when Drever’s for-sale signs were ubiquitous in his native West Auckland, a profile enhanced with his reputation as ‘‘The Voice of Speedway’’, for his commentary work at the Western Springs track. He says he was earning $1.5m a year and sold a total of $938m worth of property.

Within 18 months of joining the RE/MAX agency in September 2011, Drever was named its Young Agent of the Year, and appointed to its International Hall of Fame for best-selling agents. He told a disciplinary tribunal he was the agency’s No 1 worldwide salesman two years running; when he shifted to the bigger Ray White chain in 2013, he claimed to be ranked No 4 nationwide.

Ray White dumped him after he deposited marketing funds into his own account; police dropped charges after he returned the money.

By 2016, when he was with Harcourt’s, Drever was banned from the profession for five years. He’d already appeared before the tribunal eight times between 2011 and 2015, and its patience had expired with what the prosecution called a cavalier attitude.

Drever argued he’d been left mainly unsupervised while working frantically, selling huge amounts of property, and admitted he had, unintentionally, not ‘‘dotted his i’s and crossed his t’s’’. The Real Estate Authority said Drever was ‘‘unable or unwilling’’ to change and ‘‘the public needs to [be] protected from him’’.

Now, he reflects: ‘‘When you’re a young bloke earning over $1.5m a year, you kind of get the God complex . . . you feel you can’t make any mistakes. What

I’ve learned in hindsight is that people in this country don’t like successful people, so if you run one red light

. . . they will bring you down.’’

If only he’d realised his faults then, he says, he’d still be selling houses.

‘‘And then none of these other things would have eventuated

. . . The real sad part of this situation is, six years on, people still ring to ask me if I can sell their house.’’

When he was banned, Drever told the real estate tribunal that selling houses was the only work he was qualified for. But it didn’t stop him striking out into the world of business.

Drever’s father, Carl, was a former butcher and truck driver, once running a butchery in Herne Bay. And in November 2016,

Drever negotiated the purchase of the Mad Butcher Pt Chevalier franchise, in Carl’s name, to ‘‘relive a childhood memory’’. Those familiar with the business say Aaron was the face of the operation, not the ailing Carl, who died the following June.

Drever then briefly ran the store before placing it first in receivership, then liquidation, when liquidator John Gilbert found it already owed an estimated $96,000 to the government in IRD, KiwiSaver and PAYE, with a long list of other creditors including meat suppliers and staff. Only $61,000 was ever paid out.

One small supplier who had always sold product to the store said he simply stopped getting paid once the Drevers took over, with Aaron emailing various excuses. The $3000 debt contributed to his closure: ‘‘It was a business killer.’’

Drever swiftly moved on to running a premium supermarket, the Grocer’s Market, in Mt Eden. That store failed even more quickly, closing after five months. The store was on the site of a failed Nosh store; liquidator Damien Grant says he was tabled two offers, and counselled against Drever’s: ‘‘He won’t pay you the money,’’ Grant told the client. ‘‘Surprise, surprise, Aaron didn’t pay.’’

Grant says even before taking over, Drever had a lurk in which he lifted stock that wasn’t his. Grant tracked it to a West Auckland lockup and demanded its return (Drever says he was entitled to it). ‘‘The brazenness of it was outstanding,’’ says Grant. ‘‘What I thought was amazing was that brazenness and that skill and that audacity, the stuff he was pulling off was so low rent.’’

Everyone says the store could, should have worked. ‘‘It was an opportunity Drever blew – all Aaron had to do was run a clean operation,’’ says Grant.

But former staff describe a chaotic operation from the outset. One senior staff member, who declined to be named, said she was still owed almost $30,000. ‘‘It was a shambles from the beginning,’’ she says, describing ‘‘dodgy people coming in and out’’, suppliers removing staff as Drever haggled with them, and angry unpaid staff removing meat in lieu of wages. ‘‘Any money that turned up wasn’t banked, it went out of the door again,’’ she says.

‘‘He’s a smooth talker with the gift of the gab. He says what you want to hear, and it can take a bit of time to realise he’s bullshitting you. He’s a good conman.’’

Drever’s two companies running the store owed about $600,000. Liquidator Grant won a High Court judgment against Drever, saying he’d failed to keep correct records, for $516,105 – only for Drever to then be adjudicated bankrupt, owing $2m, preventing enforcement.

Drever later claimed he’d been sold the business with an inflated balance sheet, and had lost a combined $1.8m on the Mad Butcher and Grocer’s Market, saying: ‘‘I tried my best. I actually genuinely believed that was going to work.’’

Around the same time, Drever found himself on the committee of the Avondale Bowling Club, where his former girlfriend, fellow real estate agent Rachel Benge, was secretary. The club was battling: it had financial problems, difficulties with its neighbours, troubles over both its liquor and gaming licences and a group of members would later sign a petition to have Auckland Bowls intervene.

Drever tried to bill the club $17,500 for ‘‘consultancy work’’ and also negotiated the sale of one of the club’s greens to a company owned by his aunt, Beverley Spain, for $300,000, and on-sold it the same day to property investor Jonathan Michell for $870,000. He later accepted the sale was ‘‘morally, a bit s...’’, but he still denies it was wrong, saying he’d been trying to help a club ‘‘on its knees’’.

The missing money went to Drever’s lawyer’s trust account; he says he doesn’t know what happened to it and only benefited ‘‘less than 10 per cent’’.

The Avondale Bowling club has now closed. ‘‘It was an iconic club,’’ says Caroline Dubois, who became secretary and tried to save it. ‘‘It was very distressing and disappointing.’’ She blames Drever and club president Pat Bell equally for its closure. ‘‘We were kept in the dark . . . once it was sold, we were all angry. There was no coming back from that.’’

Auckland Bowls banned the entire committee – and gave Drever a life ban. Drever says he never played bowls, so that didn’t bother him. The bowling green affair represented half of his charges yesterday.

His real sporting love was speedway, the passion he inherited from his dad. He’d travel to the US on speedway tours, drove a car himself, and then owned a series of them. He also commentated live at the Western Springs track, calling himself ‘‘The Voice of Speedway’’.

Now, sources say, when he does attend he sits anonymously high up in the bleachers – unwelcome in the eyes of many. ‘‘He’s basically a laughing stock,’’ says one speedway fan. ‘‘He doesn’t walk around the pits any more.’’

One Auckland track, Waikaraka Park, firmly dissociated itself years ago. President Frank Irvine considered trespassing him, and says: ‘‘I refuse to deal with him, and more fool anyone who does.’’

The current promoter at Western Springs, Bruce Robertson, who took over in 2020, took the unusual step of advertising in the New Zealand Herald that Drever had no association with them. Drever also managed to annoy Coca-Cola and Tip-Top by placing unauthorised advertisements for them on his speedway car.

It wasn’t always that way. Court documents describe Drever as a lifelong family friend of millionaire businessman Bill Buckley, who held the Western Springs speedway franchise from 2002 to 2020, a relationship that began with Bill and Carl’s friendship. ‘‘Bill gave Drever a chance, and everyone warned him,’’ says one speedway fan. In 2019, Drever began working at Buckley’s Springs Promotions, apparently as a volunteer, handing out business cards describing him as Springs’ marketing manager. Drever says ‘‘I basically did everything’’ – marketing, sales, planning, driver recruitment, and in particular, negotiating for Buckley to take over the speedway at Tauranga’s Bay Park. ‘‘In hindsight, I should’ve gone to Bill and said I’m not doing this for nothing . . . I’ve accepted that the methodology of me requiring payment for my work was not orthodox, and was illegal.

‘‘I’d say if they were honest with themselves and looked themselves in the mirror, they say ‘He did all this work, and we had huge crowds in the time he was there ...’ ’’ They wouldn’t. A Springs Promotions official, who declined to be named, says there was never any plan to pay Drever, and he had not done the Bay Park deal. ‘‘He’s the ultimate salesman: that’s how he got himself in. But he is a compulsive liar . . . He’s been nothing but a pain in the arse.’’

Drever instead drew up 10 false invoices, purporting to be from a legitimate company, Billboard Solutions, with a fake GST number and an account number belonging to the Fish and Chippery (earning 10 charges of dishonestly using a document). Buckley signed off each invoice, for a total of $86,247.99.

Drever also told Buckley he could source miniature speedway models, a high-selling item with American fans, and provided invoices in the name of a fictitious company, Toy & Model Collectors Market Ltd, for a total of $15,742.93. The promised cars never turned up – instead Drever offered up some bought from an Auckland model shop. Springs Promotions lost a total of $101,990.92.

Drever’s last business venture was a chain of fish and chip shops called the Fish and Chippery, becoming involved in a business run by his partner, Melissa ‘‘Milly’’ Wymer-Tisdale, and her mother, Debbie Wymer. But former staff say they had little to do with the women and dealt almost exclusively with Drever, who styled himself as the general manager. Because of his bankruptcy, he was never a shareholder or director.

‘‘It was chaos, always chaos,’’ is how staff member Debbie Buchanan describes their operation. Rarely a float in the tills, staff often waiting for Drever to deliver stock, last-minute roster changes and late pay cheques.

Buchanan says she met Drever when he reneged on a deal to buy her West Auckland lunchbar. Instead, he said he’d found a buyer for all her equipment. She ended up working for him; one day she walked into his One Tree Hill branch and found it stocked with her gear. She describes the Te Atatu branch as a ‘‘disgusting mess’’; another worker, Holly Laurin, says the Waterview one was ‘‘horrifying’’.

Both women (and other workers) say they would routinely be paid late; Buchanan refused to work unless money showed in her account, but when she left was still owed holiday pay and regularly talked to staff who were owed substantial amounts.

First Union organiser Matt McCarten says he has spoken to at least 20 former Fish and Chippery workers who claim they are owed money. He says workers were never given contracts, and paid sporadically and often in cash. ‘‘I live in a world of liars and I’ve never come across someone before who can never get to the end of a sentence without lying, even when it’s unnecessary,’’ McCarten says of Drever.

McCarten negotiated a confidential settlement for six workers with Debbie Wymer, as the owner of the Grey Lynn store, but feels bad for her, and believes she was manipulated by Drever.

He expects her to act as a prosecution witness. ‘‘She has acted honourably, while Aaron kept telling lies.’’ He says he could not get Drever to make a settlement himself.

McCarten has delivered a tranche of documents to lead MBIE investigator Greg Bruce, who is pursuing the bankruptcy case. McCarten says the staff were vulnerable, some were migrants, some beneficiaries and one was homeless. ‘‘He was constantly using a lot of free labour.’’

Laurin is one of those who has settled, being paid $6500, while her partner got $5500. She never saw a payslip. She says Drever would often come and take the cash from the till, leaving no float, and would ask staff to deliver takeaways to him at the Grey Lynn RSA, his once-regular haunt. Laurin, a Canadian, hadn’t heard of him before: ‘‘He was telling me his backstory of how he’d been wrongfully accused of things . . . Caught in some bad business deals when I was young, but I know what I am doing now.’’

Drever denies taking cash from the business, and says he didn’t intend to deny staff their wages, and is apologetic.

In 2021, he negotiated the sale of the shops to Andrew Phillips, an Australian-based businessman who had been involved in the Grocer’s Market deal. Phillips told liquidators he had tipped in $100,000 – an amount Drever disputes – thinking he was buying three branches of the chain, but the sale was never properly executed. Drever says it was a ‘‘messy’’ deal but denies doing anything wrong. ‘‘He didn’t quite get what he wanted, I understand that,’’ he says.

It turned sour quickly – but at first, life was good. Drever stayed for some time in a downtown Beach Road apartment owned by Phillips, described by those who visited as having amazing views, until sources say Phillips evicted him (Drever denies this). For a time, it’s understood, Drever stayed in motels with his mother, who had shifted from Australia.

Phillips also took possession of Drever’s Glen Eden home in February 2019, although Drever remained living there until a Tenancy Tribunal ruling a year later that he, Melissa and Debbie all had to move out.

Drever’s bankruptcy, due to expire this year, continues as one of the charges he faces is failing to file a statement of affairs; his real estate ban has ended but even he admits he’s unlikely to get another licence.

Instead, he says, he’s been working as a consultant: ‘‘I have plenty of people who contact me wanting consultancy advice from property, to business, to marketing to business, you may scoff at that – but I have a skillset that is proven to be useful.’’

It’s 19 months since Drever was given a sentence indication of 29 months’ imprisonment; in that time he’s harboured hope of bargaining that down to home detention. Eventually, the armwrestle concluded yesterday with Drever saying: ‘‘I need to be able to put this behind me. I’ve got a lot of time left on my clock, and this has dragged me down for four years, and eventually it has to stop . . . I have put my hand up, and I am prepared to take my medicine.’’

His last hope was a psychological report which said he had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder but was a low risk of reoffending – but that didn’t earn enough of a cut from Judge Thomas to avoid jail.

With good behaviour, he should be out early next year. On the eve of the verdict, he said: ‘‘Will I bounce back? Of course I will bounce back. The sun will still rise on Saturday morning.’’