KEY POINTS:
A jury today began deliberating in the trial of two men accused of defrauding Otago District Health Board of almost $17 million.
The jurors, in the High Court at Dunedin, retired at 10.30am after Justice Lyn Stevens spent 90 minutes summing up the case, the Otago Daily Times website reported.
Michael Swann 47, the board's former chief information officer, and Kerry Harford, 48, a Queenstown surveyor, both deny acting dishonestly or fraudulently by using 198 invoices from Sonnford Solutions, a company formed by Harford, to charge the board $16.9 million for IT-related services the Crown says were never provided.
During the three-week trial, the jury heard evidence from more than 40 prosecution witnesses as well as from Swann.
The prosecution said that Swann received just over $15 million in six years, while the board was paying him an annual salary of $145,000 in his role as head of IT.
The remaining $1.8 million went to Harford.
Crown counsel Robin Bates, in his summing up yesterday, said contracts and invoices clearly showed the two men acted fraudulently and could not claim they believed they were entitled to do what they did.
But Swann's lawyer, John Haigh QC, said his client's abysmal business acumen did not make him a criminal.
For Harford, Greg King asked why, if the arrangement where Sonnford invoiced the board for computer-related services and passed 90 per cent to the Swann-controlled company Computer South was a sham, would Harford take only a 10 per cent.
It was "absurd" that a person would embark on a dishonest course of conduct to defraud $17 million and take only 10 per cent he said.
- NZPA
