Editorial: What price a loss of your money and your friend

DISGRACED: Hastings lawyer David Porteous was sentenced yesterday. PHOTO/DUNCAN BROWN.

Hastings couple Neville and Morag Lush and others ripped-off by professionals in whom they have trusted with their life savings have a right to feel devastated by the events which have hit them pretty much where it hurts most.

It is thus some credit to Mr Lush, perhaps moderated by the lengthy time these things take to pass their way through the system, that when disgraced lawyer David Porteous got some legal come-uppance yesterday, that such a victim only wanted to hear the man admit what he had done and that it was wrong.

Comparatively speaking, it was far from being the biggest rort by a lawyer or accountant in Hawke's Bay - Waipawa lawyer Warren Pickett holds the record for that in almost all respects, $20 million, 220 victims, and, apparently, 20 years of fiddling the funds of his friends.

Porteous yesterday got six months' home detention, in 2009 Pickett got five years.
The penalty however is not in the penance meted by a Judge, but in the odium and contempt all of society most show these thieves who take advantage of their own good natures and measures of good standing in the most arrogant of ways.

In the dock, they stand as pathetic figures, any remorse very hard to accept, when it is often clear it is more a moment of embarrassment over finally being found out, not really of great consequence, and almost as if it carries about the same discrediting weight as missing a kick at goal in a social rugby game.

The Law Society's own files contain what must be an alarming number of practitioners who've come to grief over issues involving dishonesty, casting some doubt over many others who don't deserve it at all, thus highlighting another part of where the damage is done by those who transgress.

There is however an irony. Some of these crimes are the biggest in the country, if the amount of money stolen, the numbers of actual victims, and the devastation of them and their families, and the duration of the offending is any measure.

The penalties, however, rarely reflect the seriousness. A lack of debate, such as we might see if it were methamphetamine or child-beating, leave some wonder as to where some standards may be. They used to cut off fingers for stealing a loaf of bread.