KEY POINTS:
Calling yourself an Auckland property developer has become so unpopular that courts are hearing claims these people were instead an office administrator and a hairdresser.
Greg Nielsen, one-time high-profile Auckland property developer, argued he had never been a developer so was not responsible for leaks at the Laxon Terrace in Newmarket.
But Justice Paul Heath of the High Court at Auckland described those claims as "demonstrably false".
Mr Nielsen and his brother Rod Nielsen owned Castlerock, a once-busy development business which built the leaky Greenwich Park off Symonds St and other large complexes with big water issues.
But Greg Nielsen claimed to be more of an office boy, fulfilling administration tasks of the various Nielsen companies in Parnell's The Strand.
The judge rejected the claim.
"Mr Nielsen gave evidence his functions were confined to liaison with creditors of various companies and acting as a messenger, to take various documents to the council or to the companies' solicitor," Justice Heath said, adding the developer was in denial about his role.
"While I cannot rule out the possibility that he gave false evidence deliberately, it is unnecessary for me to decide whether that is so. I find his evidence so implausible and unreliable that I can place no weight on it."
The court had heard how Mr Nielsen was onsite for two or three hours a day and wearing builders' clothes including shorts and gumboots.
Fellow developer Brian Gailer says now he is a hairdresser and knows nothing about building yet his case heard evidence of him also being regularly at his Northcote site. "I'm a hairdresser, I know nothing about construction," Mr Gailer told the Weekend Herald. He last appeared in the Herald on October 1 demanding the Government pay its share of the leaky homes disaster.
But the court decided Mr Gailer knew a lot about building and was indeed Kilham Mews' developer as well as project manager.
"He cannot avoid the liability the law of negligence attaches to a developer of residential buildings for carelessly creating defective buildings," Justice Ailsa Duffy ruled.
