Prime Minister Chris Hipkins will sit down with Transport Minister Michael Wood today to decide whether Wood should lose his ministerial portfolios over failing to properly disclose shares owned in Auckland Airport.

Hipkins said he would give an update on Wood’s future at his post-Cabinet press conference at 4pm today.

“I haven’t had a chance to sit down with him for a conversation. I’m going to do that before making any judgement on it - I’m going to be doing that this morning,” Hipkins said.

“As I have indicated I want to sit down with Michael and have a conversation about it - I will answer further questions about it this afternoon,” he said.

Hipkins said the situation was “certainly not helpful, but I’m going to have a conversation with him about it”.

National leader Christopher Luxon said Wood’s position was becoming “pretty untenable”.

Luxon said Wood should have been suspended when Hipkins found out about the shares on Friday.

“I think he should have suspended him immediately at that point in time,” Luxon said.

“I think he should have spent the last three days finding out exactly what the situation is and coming with some very clear answers,” he said.

Wood said he had not offered his resignation, but admitted he had made an error.

“I have acknowledged in this case that I have made an error in terms of not declaring these shares earlier on. I did declare them last year and I did, from the beginning of my time as minister, make the Cabinet Office fully aware of the shares that I held,” he said.

“I recognise I made an error in terms of not declaring these in the first register I had as minister. That was a mistake. I do apologise for that,” he said.

On Tuesday, the Herald revealed Wood owned about 1530 shares in the airport, worth about $13,000 at the current share price. He is currently in the process of selling the shares.

Wood has owned the shares since he was a teenager and should have declared them in each one of his pecuniary interest statements since becoming an MP.

Instead, they were only declared in January 2022. Wood said he had initially believed they were held inside a trust, which he did declare.

He said he declared the shares properly once he became aware they were not held inside a trust. Once it became clear they were not held in a trust, Wood said he declared them appropriately.

He said the shares were declared to the Cabinet Office shortly after he became a minister in 2020. Wood did not go back and correct previous pecuniary interest declarations, which he should have.

The issue is complicated by the fact that for more than a year after November 2020, Wood was the minister in charge of the aviation sector. Responsibility for that sector was handed over to an associate minister in 2021.

Wood said that he had tried to sell the shares in his first year as a minister.

“I had instructed the person who deals with these things for me to effectively get rid of those shares. I thought that had happened, I was wrong about that so I didn’t declare them that year,” Wood said.

“When I prepared my register of interest for the following year, and I investigated these matters I determined that in fact, I still held the shares and that’s when I declared them,” he said.

Wood said he began the process of selling shares last year.

“I began engaging with the person who deals with these things for me around that. There was some additional information that I needed to receive from the share registry which didn’t come through and the process stalled at that point - again, that’s my responsibility,” Wood said.