In 2003, in a cross-border lease with the Wachovia Bank of North Carolina (USA), Transpower sold the whole of the South Island high-voltage transmission grid to the Wachovia Bank for $701 million. It then leased the operation of the grid back from the Wachovia Bank via the Cayman Islands, a tax haven (Gorman, 2005a; Newberry and Robb, 2005a). This lease back from Wachovia is for 100 years, but the lease contains an option for Transpower to repurchase the transmission grid after approximately 25 years. The repurchase price and conditions have not been revealed. This arrangement is a lease-to-service (LTS) contract, a recent variant of abusive tax-driven arrangements that had been banned in the United States. Tax-driven arrangements are engaged in for the purpose of obtaining tax deductions or tax benefits rather than for any commercial or industrial reason. For the Wachovia Bank, the arrangement most likely would allow it to claim large tax deductions in the United States, in a manner similar to those claimed following the Wachovia Bank's tax-driven and controversial transaction in Germany with Bochum's underground sewerage system (PBS, 2006). The negative effect of transactions such as these on the United States tax base is significant.
At the time of the Transpower transaction, LTS arrangements were under investigation in the United States, and they have since been banned as tax abusive. That the nature of the arrangement was known to Transpower is apparent because reporting of the transaction in Transpower's financial reports was delayed during the investigation. The date of the Transpower transaction preceded by days the date from which the LTS arrangements were banned. The tax-abusive nature of such transactions was politically sensitive in both New Zealand and the United States.