FINDING OF £1215

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31206, 2 November 1966, Page 18

FINDING OF £1215

Magistrate’s Award

Mervyn Leonard Kirton, a workman, who found £1215 on a property at Sockburn in May after a shed had been removed was commended by Mr H.’j. Evans, S.M., in the Magistrate’s Court yesterday afternoon for "his honesty and frankness, which led him to disclose his find and so enable the restoration of a large sum of money to its rightful owner.” The Magistrate was giving a reserved decision on an application by the police to determine who is entitled to possession of the money. He awarded the money to James Mervyn Philips, a retired engineer, of Ngakuta Bay, Picton, who had run a business known as Uniweld, Ltd., from 1950 to 1964 on the site where the bank-notes were found. The two claimants were Phillips and Kirton. Mr R. F. B. Perry appeared for Philips and Mr J. A. Bretherton for Kirton.

The Magistrate said that Mr Bretherton, on behalf of Kirton and G. P. Powell and Comuany, Ltd., the owner of the property when the money was found, conceded that if Philips was shown on the evidence to have been the lawful owner of the money when it was buried, and not to have abandoned the money, he would be entitled to an order in his favour. “I have had to look closely at the evidence of Mr Philips to decide whether or not it shows that the money in fact belonged to him,” the Magistrate said. “In my opinion it does. Mr Philips gave sworn testimony at length, and was cross-examined at length. I received an impression of complete honesty. “It Is, of course, astonishing that a man should hide away in the ground many hundreds of pounds’ worth of bank-notes, and then forget all about it. . . . But I am prepared to accept Mr Philips’s story as credible, and I do. It received a certain amount of circumstantial support from other evidence. “Although Mr Kirton’s finding of the money in May received newspaper publicity at the time and must have become quite well known, no other claimant has appeared to advance a claim of his own or to dispute Mr Philips's. Nor does the evidence at any point contain the faintest suggestion of any other person having been the true owner of the money at the time it was hidden away,” said the Magistrate.