Did ATL executives accused of fraud forge four letters?
THE ATL pension fraud case resumes this morning in the Corporate Area Resident Magistrate Court, Half-Way-Tree, after a blistering session last week which caused Senior Resident Magistrate Lorna Shelley-Williams to comment: “I don’t know what is happening in this courtroom today.”
The trial so far has veered away from what prosecutors hope will be the conviction of three former ATL executives for allegedly forging letters to justify the distribution of pension fund surplus, from which they benefited, without the consent of Gorstew, its founder.
For the prosecution, the issues centre on four issues: whether there was a conspiracy to forge the documents; whether documents were actually forged; whether the allegedly forged documents were uttered, that is, presented to someone; and whether the accounts of the pension fund were falsified by using the allgedly forged documents.
So far, ATL’s main witness, David Davies, the global chief financial officer, has testified, among other things, that Dr Jeffrey Pyne, one of the three accused and former managing director of Gorstew, received funds when he resigned in May 2010 and so benefited from the “unauthorised distribution” of the pension surplus.
The other two — Patrick Lynch, former chairman, and Catherine Barber, former administrator of the pension fund — did not get actual payouts but their pension accounts were credited.
The three are accused of conspiring to have distributed $1.73 billion from the surplus, using backdated letters as proof of consent.
Davies has said that Dr Pyne, whose signature appears on the four allegedly forged letters purporting to give consent to the distribution, did not have authority to sign “consent” without first being authorised by a Gorstew board resolution. He insisted that Pyne’s signing was a fundamental material breach of his fiduciary duty as a director.
WITNESSES WEATHERED SHOUTS FROM ATTORNEY
Davies, who has weathered shouts from defence attorney K D Knight and countless requests to leave the courtroom while the magistrate separated the battling defence lawyers and prosecutors, has also testified that three of the four letters (covering the years 1998, 2002 and 2005) referred “… further to your letter regarding captioned, Gorstew Limited hereby consents to the following…” He said that he checked in vain to find the document to which reference was being made, and which was supposed to have been sent to Gorstew by the pension fund requesting consent.
He further held that the PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) Interim Report, done on December 8, 2010, saw no evidence of Gorstew’s consent to distribution of the pension fund surplus, which their final report in August 2011 (section 70) confirmed. He quoted PwC as saying: “We held discussions with the general manager who indicated that the Board of Trustees approval on file was the evidence of this sign-off. Based on examination of other clauses in the Trust Deed and Rules, this did not appear to be correct.”
Davies told the court that a meeting was held in the office of Gordon ‘Butch’ Stewart, chairman of Gorstew, on December 16, with Lynch, Barber, attorney Trevor Patterson, attorney Dmitri Singh and himself, at which time Barber allegedly produced from her pension fund file the four letters signed by Pyne and purporting to be Gorstew’s consent.
When Stewart asked Lynch when did he first come to know about those letters, he allegedly said that he had seen them the day before at the ATL pension office.
Barber had written to Lynch on July 18, 2007 asking him to reproduce the attached three letters (1998, 2002 and 2005) on Gorstew letterhead and have them signed by Pyne, Davies testified.