AN APPEAL DISMISSED

Taranaki Daily News, 8 June 1932, Page 8

AN APPEAL DISMISSED

ELTHAM SHAREMILKING CLAIM.

•DISCOVERED AFTER BANKRUPTCY

“It is perfectly clear that the magistrate’s decision was right,” said Mr. Justice Blair in the Supreme Court .at New Plymouth yesterday wj»en dismissing the appeal of Angus Campbell against a judgment at Eltham in favour of Alfred Cocker, the defendant, on a sharemilking claim. His Honour said the magistrate had found as a fact’what the contract between the parties was. Though it was not a written one, it was a loose arrangement made apparently at Campbell’s own choice. Campbell had npw come along after 3| years with a belated claim for various jobs, which he claimed were outside the terms of his sharemilking arrangement. He claimed to have kept an account of these items, but he had kept the knowledge to himself, for he had not said a single word about those items until six months after his bankruptcy.

What the parties had done in practice was to have a squaring up when the factory cheque was received, every month or so. “Yet,” continued his Honour, “three and a half years afterwards this man had the effrontery to say ‘I did this or that.’ His story is too fantastic to swallow.” His Honour said the evidence abundantly confirmed the magistrate's finding in the lower court that there was an arrangement between the parties for extra work in the way of odds&and ends. He thought he would have found the same as the magistrate, who had had evidence to justify him. In accordance with his duty on becoming bankrupt Campbell had made a statutory declaration, but in this had not mentioned the items; yet according to Campbell, later on, Cocker owed him £l9O, an asset sufficient to pay the whole of Campbell’s debts. It was only six months afterwards, however, that lie woke up to that. In dismissing the appeal with £lO 10s costs and disbursements, his Honour said it seemed that Campbell’s claim was “trumped up.”