Tauhara North No.2 Trust

The Group Chief Executive, Mana Newton, leads the operational team, with governance oversight from the board chaired by Wikitoria Hepi-Te Huia and trustees including former CEO Aroha Campbell. The trust’s commercial activities sit inside the Houkura division, but all major capital decisions — particularly those involving land — must align with the trust deed and the wishes of its iwi owners. In practice, this means the geothermal joint venture strategy and the push into solar development were shaped by both the executive and the iwi governance layer.

The trust sources almost all opportunities on or adjacent to its own whenua (land). Its geothermal assets sit above the Rotokawa-Tauhara reservoir on iwi land, and the proposed Rotokawa Solar Farm is being developed on a trustee-controlled land block. This makes its pipeline intrinsically proprietary — external developers cannot replicate the resource-consent pathway or the land title, which are held under the Te Ture Whenua Māori Act framework.

It is a Māori Land Trust, not a family office — a legally distinct entity under New Zealand's Te Ture Whenua Māori Act 1993. Unlike a single-family office built to serve a nuclear dynasty, Tauhara North No.2 serves a broad iwi beneficiary base of roughly 15,000 owners, distributing benefits through grants, scholarships and commercial dividends rather than concentrated wealth management.

No public evidence indicates the trust acts as a limited partner in external private-equity or venture funds. Its disclosed investments — Nga Awa Purua, Rotokawa A, Rotokawa Solar Farm, Rapids Jet, Te Pā Tū, and the Tokoroa dairy farm — are all direct holdings. The 2023 membership in New Zealand Private Capital suggests an interest in broader private-market structures, but the trust has not disclosed any fund commitments.

The trust's economic base originates from the geothermal resource rights and traditional land holdings of the Ngāti Tahu Ngāti Whaoa iwi. The Rotokawa geothermal field generates long-duration power revenue under a joint venture with Mercury NZ, and this electricity income funds the trust's other investments and its whānau grants. No external liquidity event created the asset base — it stems from iwi ownership of natural resources.

The trust runs a dedicated Manaaki grants and scholarships programme alongside its Houkura commercial arm. Manaaki provides subsidised tuition, community grants and member support — funded by the revenue Houkura generates from geothermal power, tourism and farming. The separation is operational rather than statutory: both sit inside the same trust structure, but Manaaki's distribution criteria are governed by the trust's deed and tikanga.

The trust's sole disclosed co-investment partner is Mercury NZ, the publicly listed energy company with which it jointly owns the Rotokawa geothermal stations. The partnership is a deep, single-relationship JV rather than a broad platform for co-investing with external GPs. No other co-investment partners have been named publicly.