END OF LONG TRIAL

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIX, Issue 21994, 20 June 1941, Page 6

END OF LONG TRIAL

Australian Conspiracy Case SYDNEY, June 19. A conspiracy trial regarded as one of the most protracted in the history of the New South Wales courts involving well-known men ended last night. The case had been before the courts for more than two years. Ronald Bruce Walker, a former member of the State Parliament, Albert Levitus, a solicitor, William Kingsley Wicks, an accountant. and Clive Oscar Airey, a secretary Were charged with having conspired with John Woollcott Forbes and two others not in custody to defraud the shareholders of the Scottish Loan and Finance Company, Ltd. Some evidence in the case was taken in New Zealand. The jury found Walker guilty with a strong recommendation to merev. Levitus was also found guilty, and Airey not guilty. The jury is still deliberating in regard to Wicks. Convicted of conspiracy, Walker was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and Levitus to five years’. Clive Airey was acquitted and discharged. The jury were unable to agree regarding Wicks who was remanded for retrial when called upon. His bail was reduced from £lOOO to £lOO. Mr Justice Haise Rogers, in sentencing Walker and Levitus, said he was assuming that the prisoners had been led astray by a man cleverer than themselves, but the fact remained that share-taking had become an infamous occupation. Companies had sprung up whose main object was the sale of their own shares. The suave, plausible persons who went about procuring the purchase of shares by the public were a menace to the community. Mostly they could be described as cheats and robbers. The offence of which both men had been convicted was the more infamous because it was engineered on the basis of false balance-sheets and faked financial statements.