 Finance Minister Roger Douglas later recounted that the "hostilities" within the Cabinet began with the Māori loans affair.At the beginning of 1987 a Television New Zealand report from Hawaii claimed a link with the CIA and suggested an American attempt to destabilise the Labour government because of its anti-nuclear policy, although Palmer thought the matter involved incompetence in the department.The loan, supposedly of $NZ 600 million of Middle Eastern petrodollars (including a "finder's fee" of $NZ 20 million), was to be used to set up a Māori Resource Development Corporation which would use Māori labour to prefabricate houses for export.