An Investigation Into the Bishop Estate’s Governance Scandal
By M.J. Prest
Senior Editor, Solutions
April 20, 2006 | Read Time: 2 minutes
NEW BOOKS
Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement & Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust
by Samuel P. King and Randall W. Roth
When the trustees of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Estate were accused of gross incompetence and fraud in 1997, a scandal erupted over the governance of one of America’s wealthiest charities. This book, by Samuel P. King, a senior U.S. district-court judge in Hawaii, and Randall W. Roth, a professor at the University of Hawaii School of Law, investigates what happened before and after the board’s dealings were brought to light.
The richest woman in Hawaii, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop died in 1884 and bequeathed her estate to endow the Kamehameha Schools to educate children in the state. By 1995, the charity’s endowment was worth an estimated $10-billion and owned more than 10 percent of all land in Hawaii.
Mr. King and Mr. Roth were two of five authors of an expose entitled “Broken Trust,” which was originally published in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in August 1997, and revealed some of the abuses committed by trustees at the charity.
The board included politicians, judges, and other local leaders, and critics suggested that trustees appointed their friends and allies, especially because the appointments carried an annual stipend of nearly $1-million a year. In addition, the critics charged that because the state’s attorney general was friendly with some board members, it did not move quickly to investigate possible abuses of nonprofit law.
This book describes the court fight that followed, the removal of the leaders who were charged with corruption, and the subsequent appointment of interim trustees who drew fire when they also requested to be paid amounts comparable to the old trustees.
Jan Hanohano Dill, a member of the group that staged protests and led the court battle, writes in an afterword that cases like the Bishop estate “demand from all of us a commitment to engage in the issues of our community, to be vigilant against the abuse of power, and to be willing to stand for what is..right.”
Publisher: University of Hawai’i Press, 2840 Kolowalu Street, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822; (808) 956-8255 or (800) 847-7377; fax (808) 988-6052; uhpbooks@hawaii.edu; http://www.hawaii.edu/uhpress; 324 pages; $26; ISBN 0-8248-3014-8.
