WAR OFFICE FRAUDS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11843, 21 December 1901, Page 2 (Supplement)

WAR OFFICE FRAUDS.

GOVERNMENT CONTRACTOR AND

CORPORAL SENT TO PRISON. The War Office frauds case came to an "end at the Old Bailey a few days since. Accused were Henry Coram, 54, a Justice of the Peace and steamship owner and contractor, Neyland House, Pembroke Dock; Anthony James, 60, also a Justice of the Peace; and Charles Ewart Davies, 23, a corporal in the Army Service Department,' Pembroke, who were charged with conspiracy to defraud the War Office.

The evidence has already been published.

Mr. Horace Avory, on behalf of James, argued that there was not a tittle of evidence to substantiate the suggestions of the prosecution that James had been associated with a conspiracy to defraud. The strongest possible evidence of his innocence was the statement that he made at the time of his arrest. James was merely a paid servant of Coram and Company, and, if any fraud had been committed he was innocent of it.

Mr. Leyches'er, for Davies, said that the alterations in the carriers' notes were made not for the purposes of fraud, but with the view of keeping the accounts in order at a time when there was great pressure of work at the depot, consequent on the war in Africa. -

Mr. Justice Bigham, in summing up, observed that some of the alterations in the accounts were, of such a character that it was difficult to suppose they could have been made innocently. The jury,-.after a few minutes' deliberation, acquitted James, who was discharged, but found the other two prisoners guilty. The Judge: You, James, may be discharged. Davies, as to you, I have no aoubt at all about the righteousness of this verdict. I am quite satisfied that you deliberately falsified these accounts in order to get money. That was why you did it. You did it in order to enable Coram to get mors money than was due to him, so that you might go to him and receive from him a reward for your dishonesty. I am extremely sorry to see a man of your youthful years in such a position, and I shall do my best; consistently with the duty that is upon me, to give you an opportunity of recovering the position which for the present vou have lost. You must go to prison for nine calendar months as an offender in the second division. Coram, your case, in my opinion, •is much worse than that of the other man. Yuur position and your comparative affluence ought to have prevented you from perpetrating these miserable frauds upon the country. . Your age ought to have prevented you from tempting that boy, as 1 believe you did, out of the path of honesty, and it would be wrong if I were not to punish you far more than I punish him. - You must go for 18 months to prison, with hard labour.