More than two years after a Northland tour company was ordered to pay reparations over a tourist's death, the money remains unpaid and the company has now been placed into liquidation with a tax debt of nearly $1 million, a case that illustrates precisely why reparations cover, not the fine itself, is the part of a WorkSafe penalty that liability insurance is actually built to protect.
Sand Safaris 2014 Ltd was sentenced in May 2023 after a WorkSafe prosecution following the death of Jin Chang Oh, a 68-year-old tourist from South Korea killed at Te Paki Sand Dunes in 2019. The company was fined $200,000, a penalty that under New Zealand law can never be covered by insurance, and separately ordered to pay Oh's family $183,200 in reparations for emotional harm and consequential loss.
It is that second figure that matters for cover. Reparations and legal defence costs arising from a WorkSafe prosecution can be insured through statutory liability cover, even though the fine itself cannot. Whether Sand Safaris held that cover is not stated in court records, but more than two years on, WorkSafe says it has not received the $23,000 owed toward its legal costs, and it remains unclear whether the family has received their reparations either.
The company was placed into liquidation on Monday after the Commissioner of Inland Revenue pursued a tax debt that had grown past $1 million. The company sold four buses for $1 million in April and paid down $342,006 of the debt, but the court found it "prima facie insolvent" and declined its application for more time.
For brokers advising tourism, adventure activity or other public-facing operators, the case is a concrete argument for statutory liability cover specifically, rather than general liability alone: it is the one part of a WorkSafe outcome that insurance can actually guarantee gets paid, regardless of what happens to the operator's finances afterward.
