Bank plans found at rubbish dump

Press, 14 August 1980, Page 8

Bank plans found at rubbish dump

PA Wellington If bank robbers had gone scaveraging in a Wellington rubbish dump recently' they might have found the plans of the Bank of New Zealand’s new headqarters building in Wellington, with details of security areas, vaults, and cash-handling zones. They would now know where the cash lift that will carry the bank’s gold and currency from the vaults will start and stop inside the building’s 31 floors.

Set out for them would be the spot where cash for tellers in the bank and its agencies will be received and issued. Custody safes, the inner strongroom, the branch bank, and head-office vaults would be pinpointed. So would the most important elements in any successful bank robbery planning: the location of the security control room and the heart of the bank’s electrical system.

The plans, which carry details of each floor of the new bank to the twentyeighth, which will be occupied by directors and top management, were found in the dump by a customer of the bank. He has a mortgage, and does not want to be identified.

He delivered the plans to the Wellington newspaper, the “Evening Post.” The plans were not identified by the. finder until he opened them up at home. He had taken them for paper for his young children. He noticed that taped around the bundle was an advice note from Stephenson and Turner, the bank’s architects, to its former main construction con-

tractor, Civil and Civic Pty, Ltd. The advice note identified the bundle as containing prints of architectural drawings hand-delivered to Civil and Civic by Stephenson and Turner on January 22 1975. Civil and Civic’s Wellington manager, Mr C. Wilkinson, declined to comment on the dumping, but Mr H. Stacey, the Stephenson and Turner architect in charge of the bank’s

construction, expressed concern that the geography of the bank and its security areas had been disclosed .

“Real security details and protection devices are under tight control and could not be included in anything dumped by Civil and Civic,” he said.

“However, that the geography of the bank has now been discovered by outsiders is very unfortunate,” Mr Stacey said.