Two more players in pokie scam change pleas to guilty

Brent Todd. Photo / Dean Purcell

Two more players in a Serious Fraud Office inquiry into a $2 million pokie charity fraud have admitted their part in the kickback scam.

Touch NZ officials Geoffrey Alan Thompson and Alistair Richard Arnott pleaded guilty to fraud charges in the Auckland District Court this week. The trial was to begin in July.

The pair had previously pleaded not guilty but changed their pleas after a sentence-indication hearing in front of Judge Nicola Mathers.

Former Kiwi league stars Brent Todd and Hugh McGahan, ex-All Black Doug Rollerson and Todd's business partner Stanley Wijeyaratne have already admitted their roles in the kickback scheme. A woman, who has name suppression, has pleaded not guilty.

The scam involved four years of false invoices and accounts to defraud sports organisations out of hundreds of thousands of dollars from pokie proceeds.

Todd and Wijeyaratne owned a number of bars across Auckland that had gaming machines. The group is accused of taking kickbacks, over a four-year period, from gaming-machine money intended for North Harbour Rugby Football Union and Touch NZ.

False invoices would then be written to account for the transactions, about 50 per cent of the successful grants.

The bills were supposedly for consultancy work, speaking engagements, accommodation, travel, training fees, functions, building or contracting work.

"The prosecution case is that all invoices were false, and were effectively just a mechanism for Todd and Wijeyaratne to achieve kickbacks from the granting of gaming funds," an SFO statement said.

Of the $1.9 million granted to North Harbour rugby through pubs operated by Todd and Wijeyaratne, about $1 million was returned to the pair through the fake invoices.

Of the $2.24 million awarded to Touch NZ from August 2002 to February 2004, about $1 million was dishonestly reclaimed.

The SFO said the pair took the money with the full knowledge and co-operation of Rollerson, the North Harbour chief executive at the time, as well as Thompson and Arnott at Touch NZ.

Todd and Wijeyaratne filed invoices through intermediary company Lateral Vision, owned by former Kiwis captain McGahan, and another firm owned by a woman whose identity remains suppressed.

Arnott and Thompson never told the board of Touch NZ of the kickback arrangement and took steps to hide the payment of $1,008,735 in financial statements.