Philip Routhan, who was sacked from his role with the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board last year, made the claim at an Employment Relations Authority meeting yesterday. Mr Routhan is before the authority fighting to get his job back.

He alleged he was asked to lie to Building and Construction Minister Maurice Williamson about safety problems at the request of board chairwoman Hazel Armstrong, which she denied.

Mr Routhan said he discovered a large number of gas certificates, which must be returned to the board by a certified gasfitter after work is done, were being returned with serious irregularities and were not being followed up.

According to his written evidence, in one case a gasfitter had requested 572 certificates, but an investigation showed only 290 were returned. Forty-four installations were found to have been put in by a person without a licence, with 33 determined to be "high risk".

Six months after becoming aware of the problem, Mr Routhan received a complaint about a gas explosion in a fish and chip shop in Nelson, where the roof had lifted and the front window and rear wall had been blown out. After investigations, more problems were discovered.

A third investigation into another gasfitter revealed 113 illegal installations.

Mr Routhan told the hearing he was making the information public because he was certain someone would be killed. "Somebody is going to die because of this, and I make this statement clearly in public today: somebody is going to get killed because of this."

Mr Routhan also claimed Ms Armstrong asked him not to tell Mr Williamson when he had briefed her about the problems. He said she knew what questions Mr Williamson was going to ask, one of which was when the board had known about the issue, and asked him "not to drop me in the sh*t".

Mr Routhan said he was uncomfortable with lying to a Crown minister, but Mr Williamson did not ask the question.

Ms Armstrong admitted making the request but said it was taken out of context. She said she had only been told in passing on the street and had not realised the seriousness of the situation. "It was not intended to mislead the minister or withhold accurate information from the minister."

The board fired Mr Routhan last year after he took more than 4000 documents from the board office. He said the papers included 761 gas certificates dating from 2005 that proved his claim.

what happened to the 760 odd certs that Routhan said proved it was dangerous.......what did they prove, how did they prove?

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This needs to be sorted out. Thats my personal opinion. They can rant and rave all they want about safety but when the shit hit the fan they went after the wrong guy. Knowingly to i'd say. They just didnt want to prosecute people directly connected to the board. I wish I could of remembered to bring this up at the meeting Max Pederson attended. Why does the board stay idle? Stinks of corruption.

If I were on the board I would lay down the f**king law that no one is above it the law and investigate whole heartedly what actually happened and who is actually responsible. Now that would restore some god dam trust back into this industry. Look at that I just worked out how the board can gain some traction with the trades people. All they have to do is their job 

I am pretty sure what happened (as are others).....but to be sure I have put in a OIA request for the action taken.......tell you all in 20 working days.

This happened just after the explosion, the Board sent letters to all the sites of my charges.....lumping me in with this........................I have never been to feckin Northland.

The gasfitter that was selling signed gas certificates was, I understand a 72 year old man, who has since (I also understand) handed in his ticket.  He was selling them off to a particular section of the population who were then filling them in.  I also understand that several of the people who filled them in were not properly licensed gasfitters.  From recollection I think some of the gas certificates were still blank and not filled in, and every one of the 290 odd that they found were visited and had various problems with them from minor to major.  I do not know who had to pay to rectify these problems, I suspect the members of the public who employed people who were probably cheap and did not check they were qualified.  I seriously doubt that the gasfitter visited the jobs, despite his claims.  From what I heard he didn't think there was any problem signing off blank certs to gain a few extra bucks. 

Routhan did remove files from the PGDB office.  I submitted an OIA on behalf of my staff asking if any files mentioning them were removed - and I was told by the Registrar that each member of my staff would need to submit and OIA and ask that question as they would not discuss someone else's information with me.  I did toy with the idea of writing 30 odd individual letters and then making the buggers write 30 odd replies back, but it seemed a bit pointless.

I am not sure if the files were recovered and what exactly went missing, but I would assume Mr Routhan had to return all the property as clearly it was not his.  If not then the Board have not taken due care of information that it is responsible for holding, and perhaps if anyone was charged with not certifying a job they could rightly claim that perhaps that particular certificate was taken by an ex Board staff member and not returned.  That would be a pickle.