Councillors did not sign-off on the spending - something Lavery said was needed because of a history of leaks.
"Once you expose commercial details at a committee level it gets into the public domain and you lose your competitive edge," Lavery told Radio New Zealand, adding that any suggestion there was insufficient paperwork on the deal was "nonsense".
"I think the current debacle in the press illustrates perfectly why it's not appropriate to have it in the political domain. It gets politicised, and I think a lot of organisations wouldn't touch us with a barge pole if that happened."
Because Cthulhu forbid that the public or their representatives should want to have a say on how their money is spent...
This is not acceptable. The CEO is supposed to work for the council. Instead, he's hiding significant decisions from them and refusing to keep records precisely to prevent democratic oversight. And he should be sacked for it.