RESIDENT Magistrate Jennifer Straw yesterday convicted former bank managers Melanie Tapper and Winston McKenzie for collecting money by false pretences and conspiring to defraud businessman Bentley Rose and his two companies, Benros Limited and Macro Finance Corporation Limited.

Both will be sentenced next Thursday.

McKenzie’s wife, Elaine, a nurse, was acquitted, for although her name appeared as a signatory to some of the damning documents, the resident magistrate theorised that she may not have known what was going on and gave her the benefit of the doubt.

The trio were accused of fleecing Rose and his companies of several million of dollars by signing cheques without his knowledge or consent.

Tapper, who worked as a branch manager at the Trafalgar Commercial Bank before moving on to become general manager of the CIBC and McKenzie, Rose’s business partner and a former manager of the now defunct Workers Bank, went on trial three years ago to answer the charges.

The case, which the judge spent two hours outlining yesterday, went through several twists over the three-year period as lawyers representing the convicted pair fought a decision by Glen Andrade, the then director of public prosecutions, to transfer the case to the Supreme Court for trial by a judge and jury. Andrade’s decision constituted an attempt to prevent Resident Magistrate Millicent Rickman from hearing the case after she referred to the prosecutors as ‘persecutors and wood worms’. Rickman subsequently withdrew from the case which then went to RM Straw.

The lawyers also tried to bar defence attorney Gayle Nelson, who was granted a fiat to prosecute the accused trio by the Director of Public Prosecutions’ Office, from the case, but that failed.

In the meantime, the civil suit that Rose filed against the Workers Bank to recover over $140 million is pending in the Supreme Court.