Tauhara North No.2 Trust

Tauhara North No.2 Trust

The Trust was formed in 1991 to collectively manage the lands of the Tauhara North No.2 block for the descendants of its original Māori owners — the Ngāti Tahu Ngāti Whaoa iwi. Its founding charter, "kia mau ki te whenua, whakamahia te whenua hei painga mo nga uri whakatipuranga" (hold fast to the land and make the best use of it for future generations), frames every allocation decision. Operating from an office on Vaughan Road in Rotorua, the Trust has evolved from a land-custody vehicle into a diversified commercial operator. The Trust's economic base rests on geothermal steam. It joint-ventures the 140 MW Nga Awa Purua power station and the Rotokawa A plant with listed utility Mercury Energy, selling electricity into the national grid under long-term contracts. Cash flow from those offtakes funds a renewable-energy buildout — the Rotokawa Solar Farm on Rapids Road is the most visible next asset — as well as a portfolio of hospitality and agribusiness holdings. Mana Newton's team directly operates Te Pā Tū, a Māori cultural village and performance venue in Rotorua, and the Rapids Jet boat experience on the Aratiatia Rapids. The Trust also runs a dairy farm in Tokoroa and a commercial property, Ngahere House. An Altss estimate places the Trust's net assets around $265M, though no public AUM figure exists. Governance sits with a board of trustees chaired by Wikitoria Hepi-Te Huia; a grants and scholarships arm, Manaaki, distributes a portion of the surplus to support education and tuition for whānau. The registry team pursues an active program to locate and enroll all beneficial owners, which gives the Trust a perpetual built-in accountability mechanism: the descendants who control the land can be traced through the TN2T Registry. What distinguishes the Tauhara North No.2 Trust is its land-attached perpetuity structure. It cannot be sold, merged, or diluted — the underlying geothermal estate is inalienable under Māori land law. This makes the Trust a genuinely intergenerational institutional investor whose horizon is measured in centuries, not fund cycles. As it layers solar generation onto the established steamfields, the entity behaves increasingly like a renewable infrastructure platform, but one where the ultimate shareholders are a defined, living community rather than financial LPs.