$25,000 fine for ignoring court

An Ellerslie trucking operator has been fined $25,000 for breaching a High Court ban on operating a cartage business.

Imposing the fine in the High Court at Auckland, Justice Robert Chambers said that William McNeil had a "persistent record of snubbing his nose at the law."

The judge said McNeil had run a number of trucking businesses for many years, but unfortunately chose to run them outside the law.

Often he ran them without appropriate transport licences and frequently did not pay the required road-user charges.

All diesel-powered vehicles must pay road-user charges.

Prosecuting did not seem to deter him, the judge said.

Once one of his companies had accumulated "masses" of unpaid fines and road-user charges, he would simply put it into liquidation and start another company.

Justice Chambers said that eventually the director of the Land Transport Safety Authority obtained a High Court injunction from Justice Sir Ian Barker, preventing Mr McNeil from controlling or being involved in the operation of a trucking business for two years.

After hearings in the High Court at Auckland, Justice Chambers said in a reserved decision that there had been a blatant and wilful disregard of the injunction.

While the injunction was an extraordinary measure, it had clearly been justified given McNeil's behaviour over the previous years.

"Mr McNeil, after Justice Barker's decision, didn't miss a beat. He carried on just as before.

"He thought he could circumvent the injunction by two of his old tricks - add another company to the mix and use a member of the family as a front."

The judge said this "just will not do" and fined McNeil $25,000.