LEGAL TRAP

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 200, 21 May 1931, Page 8

LEGAL TRAP

Napier Hospital Board

MEMBER’S RESIGNATION

Dominion Special Service.

Hastings, May 20.

Circumstances which are most probably without parallel in local-body polities in New Zealand have compelled Mr. Cecil Duff, one of the two Hastings members of the Hawke’s Bay Hospital Board, to relinquish his position. The situation has some curious elements in it, for it was brought about entirely by the necessary, but actually illegal, methods of commandeer which were exercised in regard to goods urgently needed during the emergency period on February 3. Mr. Duff holds a position as a director of the Hastings Steam Laundry, the staff, plant, and equipment of which were virtually seized by the Royston Private Hospital authorities, who organised the emergency hospital at the Hastings racecourse. When that hospital was transferred to the Hastings Memorial Hospital it came under the jurisdiction of the Hawke’s Bay Hospital Board, and the Steam Laundry still carried on doing laundering for hospital purposes. Payments were, of course, duly made to it by the board. Immediately realising the accidental trap into which he had fallen, Mr. Duff, who is a solicitor, investigated his legal standing in the matter, and found himself with no alternative but to resign, as he Ims done. It is not at all unlikely that a number of other members of local bodies here may now be found to have become compromised in a similarly unfortunate way.