Mates' rates at heart of helicopter case

(From left) Peter Pharo, Wayne Porter, Malcolm Beattie and Tom Romley have been found not guilty. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

Put yourself in Julie Helson's shoes, working as a marketer, persuading companies to do something for nothing for a good cause.

It's rewarding but tough, and it doesn't help that you have no budget. Then you see some figures that say there is a marketing budget, that you have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising.

Huh? you think. So you ask questions.

The response leaves you deeply suspicious. The big boss seems far from open. In fact he tells you to mind your business. You go to the finance manager and get the cold shoulder. You're told you'll be in "very deep water" if you push the issue.

You wonder what they're so sensitive about, and you try to find out.

The GoldTimes case, or the rescue helicopter fraud case as you may know it, finished on Thursday with the acquittal of all accused.

Work out who was important in it coming to light, and you come down to one name: Julie Helson.

She was a staff member who became a whistleblower. She copied documents relating to the advertising scheme and handed them to an investigator at the Department of Internal Affairs.

They showed that half of the grants that came to the air ambulance trusts from pokie machines went back as advertising payments to the pubs which hosted the machines.

It seemed excessive to say the least, more so when she and a colleague checked advertising at one of the pubs and could find none at all for the fixed wing rescue service, ChildFlight, despite a large payment being made.

It must have seemed a cosy arrangement.

The pubs the Palace, Birdcage, Strand, Cazino Bar and Goldie's Casino were Wayne Porter's and business partner Peter Pharo's. They were also trustees of GoldTimes, which chose which charities would be given the pokie money.

In practice, the bulk was given to the trusts which operated the air ambulance services, ChildFlight and its big brother, the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Service (ARHS), which runs what's known at the Westpac Rescue Helicopter.

Porter and Malcolm Beattie, a prominent businessman with a background in advertising and sports marketing, who had a hand in Auckland hosting the 1990 Commonwealth Games, were key figures in the helicopter service. They got it going and still held sway, with Beattie, as executive chairman, the big boss.

They were friends from their longstanding association with surf lifesaving in Auckland. Tom Romley, also with a surf background, ran the trusts' finances. The group had influence at all corners of a triangle around which pokie money sloshed.

The Crown alleged that between 1995 and 2002 GoldTimes paid the trusts $13.6 million, of which $5.8 million was given back for pub advertising that bore no relation to commercial reality. In other words, a scam.

Helson's curiosity upturned lives, not least her own, setting in motion a four-year roller coaster.

An assertive woman, she came to court 14, upstairs in Auckland's imposing stone High Court, and gave her evidence in a clear, strong voice.

Seated at the back of the gallery that day, lending support, was her partner, Karl Sunderland, a police officer. He didn't know her back when she was doing her sleuthing, but he knows the toll it's taken on her.

She had felt threatened, he told the Weekend Herald.

"She has lived in fear for years," he said. There had been strangers knocking at her door.

It had been more than unpleasant and, he suggests, she may not have testified had she not had to. She was relieved it was nearing an end and wanted to keep a low public profile.

While Internal Affairs and the SFO were investigating, the trusts had launched their own hunt for the whistleblower, hiring a private detective.

An unidentified rescue crew member was quoted saying that if he found out who was making the allegations "I'll strangle them".

It was not only Helson who considered the pokie arrangements had a bad smell. Internal Affairs senior gambling inspector Robin Barrett did too. He had secret meetings with Helson and a colleague from whom he received documents copied from trust files.

A copy of an email Romley wrote to Scott Watson, the chief executive at the time, raised his eyebrows. It was in response to Barrett's request for financial records and seemed to him to contain a taint of guilt.

"The audit ... will very quickly lead to the advertising," Romley wrote, advising they stall for time to consult lawyers and devise a strategy.

"I took this to be a crucial piece of evidence and showed it to my superior," Barrett said in evidence.

Soon after, the file was handed to the SFO. Back then, Beattie was telling media he was confident the SFO probe would clear everyone, that there were no hidden transactions, no money missing.

But rather than give the ad scheme the green light, the SFO investigation resulted in Porter, Pharo, Beattie and Romley being charged with conspiracy to defraud the trusts.

It was not a simple case of someone diverting money into their own pocket, say through a hidden bank account. No money was unaccounted for.

Beattie and Romley didn't line their pockets. Their benefit, the Crown said, was in seeing a reliable flow of money to the trusts. The financial fillip, the Crown alleged was to Porter and Pharo, whose pubs relied on the ad money for survival.

The case had unusually high stakes. In the dock were influential and respected people, and in question too was the reputation of the country's top fraud investigators, as the defence claimed the SFO fell victim to a mindset which caused them to misinterpret the situation.

Each day of the hearing, Justice Christopher Allan looked out over three rows of lawyers in their gowns, and a fourth row containing the accused, all in their 60s, dark-suited and neatly groomed. Viewed from the gallery behind, it made for a sweep of black.

Computer screens sat on each desk. The pub owners shared one, Beattie and Romley had another.

They followed proceedings intently, occasionally jotting a note. Family and friends attended periodically. Beattie's wife seemed always to be there.

Until the last week, when Porter broke down as his lawyer described him as a genuine man with a real passion for the rescue service, the stress was inaudible, revealed in such actions as the salt and pepper-haired Beattie patting his wife's back in an attempt at reassurance.

They sat through evidence the Crown said pointed to conspiracy. Romley had taken GoldTimes documents from his office next to Helson's and "hidden" them in his car boot.

When the SFO turned up at his Milford home, search warrant in hand, Romley asked if he could take the car up the road to fetch milk. This, the Crown said was an attempt to stop investigators finding the "boot documents" which the court was told were crucial to discovering the true nature of the funding-advertising arrangement.

Prosecutor Nicholas Davidson, QC, called it "an absolute nonsense", a money-go-round by which Porter and Pharo got a large chunk of the gamblers' cash. There was nothing to indicate that they had shopped around for a better deal from the pokies.

The Crown alleged that documents were created after investigations began and backdated in "a fraudulent" attempt to cover tracks.

Beattie, a decisive man and a dominant influence in the trusts' operations, is credited, with Porter, with getting the rescue chopper off the ground.

"It wouldn't be here without them," current trust chief executive Rea Wikaira told the Weekend Herald. "They started it, they made the sacrifices, had the vision, the passion, the drive."

Popular opinion seems to be that Beattie is a tough, passionate businessman who gets things done.

Only one of the defendants chose to present evidence, two character witnesses. Instead, the defence strenuously challenged the Crown's interpretations, arguing that although there may have been conflicts of interest, the four honestly believed the arrangement was good for the trusts.

The advertising revenue, rather than enrich the pub owners, only just made the businesses viable and so kept the pokies running and therefore the grants coming.

As owners of buildings worth $7 million, they had to make money from their buildings but this had been balanced against the trusts' interest.

To the Crown's contention that the amount paid for advertising was unrealistic, the defence argued it was not simply a case of hiring a billboard beside a motorway.

The advertising was on the premises where the GoldTimes pokies were, telling people that money spent gambling here benefited the air ambulance services. Feedback from telemarketing had indicated advertising was having an impact, the court was told.

The non-existent ChildFlight advertisement was an embarrassing but honest mistake.

There was nothing sinister in Romley removing documents to store offsite, and no ill intent in his request to go for milk.

His email in response to the gaming inspector's request for documents was motivated by commercial sensitivity, and rather than hide the basis of the advertising arrangement, the board of trustees was told about it in 1995, as the minutes showed.

Paul Davison, Queen's Counsel for Porter, criticised the SFO for not interviewing all of the trustees from this time.

"It shows a closed mind," he told the jury in his closing address. "It illustrates why we are here, because the investigation was never done as thoroughly and fully as it should have been."

The jury was told how a doctor's efforts to interest health authorities in an air service dedicated to children fell on deaf ears. And yet those in the dock got ChildFlight in the air.

This was not, Davison suggested, a case of the ends justifying the means but of surf "clubbies using their ingenuity to make it happen".

Was there not room, he asked, for the view that his client "believed what he was doing was absolutely right and honest?"

The trial ran six weeks. The jury deliberated for three hours before returning verdicts of not guilty.