TIME-KEEPING AT RONGOTAI

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29368, 22 November 1960, Page 10

TIME-KEEPING AT RONGOTAI

Statements By

Accused

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, Nov. 21.

The police were interested in bigger fish than he or his fellow accused and they had wanted him to turn Queen’s evidence, John Edward Gilmore, a former Ministry of Works overseer, said in the Supreme Court at Wellington today. Gilmore was making an unsworn statement from the dock in the case in which he and Charles McDonald Waterson, a contractor, jointly face 32 charges of false pretences concerning the hire of machines during the construction of Wellington airport. Today was the fifth day of the trial.

Counsel's addresses were concluded tonight and Mr Justice McCarthy, will sum up tomororw morning.

“This case is not against us two,” Gilmore said. “We were caught up in the system used at Rongotai.” Gilmore said he was expected to falsify dockets to cover the amounts concerned.

Waterson said in evidence that he understood from Gilmore that the machine he operated would be paid all the time it was at Rongotai whether it was working or not. The first time he heard any suggestion of fraud was after he left Bognuda’s employment and was an independent contractor working with his own machine for the Ministry of Works at Johnsonville. At the time the dockets were signed at Rongotai he did not know of any fraud.

Waterson said that while he was working at Johnsonville the difference in the systems used there and at Rongotai made him “a bit suspicious that there must have been something crooked going on at Rongotai.” Addressing the jury on Waterson’s behalf, Mr K. Matthews said Waterson had at all times said the dockets showed incorrect times. They were made out the way they were on the instructions of Gilmore and never with fraudulent intent. The statement attributed to Gilmore that it was necessary to make up hours for unauthorised machines was a plausible story that Waterson was entitled to accept For the Crown, Mr W. R. Birks contended the evidence established that both accused participated dishonestly in signing false daily time dockets with intent to defraud the Government and secure the payment to F. and J. Bognuda, Ltd., of money to which the firm was not entitled.