Online exclusive
Scene of the crime: In May 2002, a Canadian accountant was given an eight-month jail sentence by a New Zealand judge. His crime? His amazing CV.
On paper, John Davy wasn’t just the right man for the job, he was like some sort of superman.
The Canadian accountant with the flash MBA from the prestigious-sounding Ashland School of Business at Denver State University in the US, had worked around the globe in high-powered-sounding jobs in London, Paris, Geneva, Saudi Arabia and Vancouver. He had also been a member and adviser to the British Columbia Securities Commission, an anti-investment fraud agency, in Canada.
His wondrous career highlights didn’t end there. This human dynamo had more than 35 years’ experience in sports and entertainment.
He was, he said, a former Canadian national fencing champion, but had also been a referee for the National Hockey League, the pro ice hockey competition which is a religion in Canada and parts of the US.
He was an accomplished record and video producer, too, as well as being a composer, songwriter and musician. He had even written a hit song.
He had drafted and managed international licensing and royalty agreements and had extensive experience in major event and professional sports administration.
He had even written, though God knows where he found the time, two books, The Platinum Formula and The Art of Record Producing.
Yes, on paper John Davy was a hell of a guy. The trouble was that in person, he wasn’t so much a superman as a wild Canadian charlatan, a grifter from Whistler with a fake CV.
And for a few weeks around the turn of the century, this Canadian bullshit artist became the most notorious man in New Zealand.
The Job He Didn’t Apply For
The year is 2002. After decades of struggle to get a standalone Māori TV channel to air, it looks likely this minor miracle will finally come to pass, thanks to the Helen Clark-led Labour government.
Veteran Māori broadcaster, failed national political candidate and former journalist Derek Fox is the chair of the newly-minted Māori Television Service (MTS), the wholly publicly funded body that will eventually launch Māori TV in 2004.
But in early 2002 Fox, a prickly character who cofounded Te Pāti Māori, has one job: to find and appoint MTS’s most important employee, the channel’s first chief executive officer.
Millennium People, an agency specialising in Māori recruiting, is hired to find the right person for this crucial job, and a worldwide search attracts more than 20 applicants. The recruiters have one surprising recommendation, though: among the six people on the shortlist is a Canadian blow-in, one who hadn’t even applied for the position. The balding, 51-year-old accountant, born in Ottawa, late of Whistler, wanted the chief finance officer’s role at MTS. But Millennium People reckons he has what it takes to be top dog.
So it was that, despite the shortlist including three Māori, the MTS board decides the person who will be charged with building a TV station championing Māori language, culture, custom, society and history wouldn’t be Māori. Or even speak Māori. In fact, he wouldn’t even be a New Zealander. The winning applicant, the board decides, should be the blow-in from Canada.
The Grand Announcement
The press release from Fox was emphatic. “John Davy was elected ahead of others because of the strong financial and management skill and experience he has. He also has strong start-up experience and those are the sort of skills we need right now. The Board members are completely confident that he will carry out the task we require of him.”
Fox’s short statement in March 2002 went on to report that Davy was a former CEO for Asia Pacific Investment Advisors in Hong Kong, CEO of International Business Partners in Canada and CFO for one Saudi Arabia’s largest telecommunications companies. He had been in New Zealand since 2001 where he had been CEO/CFO of “an emerging company in the field of virtual internet and consumer e-commerce”.
But was he really? There was one who had doubts. While it has never been publicly revealed who first worked out Davy might not be what he claimed, a 2014 Sunday Star Times’ story reported that John Peebles, a director at executive search consultant John Peebles Associates, was thought to be the whistleblower.
Peebles’ firm had been involved in a search for another telly executive not long before MTS’ CEO appointment. It is believed Davy’s name had not emerged during Peebles’ worldwide search for candidates for this other TV role. Peebles is suspected to have then taken his suspicions to former Act MP and world-class provocateur Rodney Hide.
Davy, meanwhile, had already got some $55,000 salary advance and loans - close to $100,000 in today’s money - from his new employer MTS, and had quickly left behind the less-chi-chi Auckland suburb of Birkenhead for a flash seaside address in Kohimarama, where he moved into a $975-a-week (around $1700 now) rental with a swimming pool. He’d also bought a Jaguar car, always a bad sign.
Still, at last MTS had its first CEO. But not for long.
A Charlatan Unmasked
Five days. From the first reports in the New Zealand Herald about Davy to his sacking as CEO, it took just five, short days.
Towards the end of April 2002, a little over a month after Fox’s press release, a thirsty, young reporter at the paper, a thoroughly good egg by the name of Louisa Cleave, began examining in detail Davy’s career history. It didn’t take her long to discover his resumé wasn’t - like so many CVs are - loosely based on a true story but appeared to be a near complete work of fiction.
For a start, his MBA had to be fake because the university he gained it from did not exist.
During the 10 years until 1998, when Davy’s CV claimed he was working in London, Paris, Geneva and Vancouver, Cleave was able to place him, in the early to mid-1990s, in tiny Canadian ski town of Whistler. Davy was running an accounting business from a bedroom in his modest house there.
No one at the British Columbia Securities Commission had heard of him, though Davy would later claim this was because his work was so highly confidential he had been put in a witness protection programme because of it.
His claim that he had been an ice hockey official turned out to be true. But not at National Hockey League level, just social grade games after a one-day training course. Further, those familiar with his reffing said he was “terrible”.
The Canadian Fencing Association - Davy had claimed he’d been a national champion - had no record or memory of him.
As for being a songwriter, a Canadian lawyer recalled to Cleave that Davy claimed to have written a song called Red Rubber Ball, a hit in a number of countries, including Canada and New Zealand in 1966. Davy was about 14 at that time; the song was actually written by Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley of The Seekers.
If much of what was on Davy’s CV was lies, there were a couple of actual facts he left off: his two insolvencies. A person matching Davy’s details was bankrupted twice in Canada, once in 1980 and again in 1993.
Even the “emerging company in the field of virtual internet and consumer e-commerce” he’d been working for in Auckland had gone belly up.
At first, MTS chairman Fox backed his man, telling the Herald its proof that Davy had faked his MBA proved nothing, only that the paper was “Māori bashing”. But as the evidence of Davy’s mendacity mounted, it became clear to MTS that the Canadian’s position was untenable. Davy offered to resign for “adjusting my background” but was instead fired two days later. He had been CEO of MTS for just 46 days.
The Aftermath
Next came the punchline: even after being caught out with a CV full of porkies, the wild Canadian charlatan kept on lying. While admitting to a TV reporter in the days after his sacking that he loved “fantasising”, Davy claimed he was “for real” and denied he was a crook.
An Auckland District Court judge disagreed. Exactly a month after Davy was sacked, Judge Phil Moran jailed him for eight months, after Davy pleaded guilty to one charge of using a document, his CV, to obtain a benefit or privilege “namely a senior appointment with the MTS”.
All up, Davy’s 46 days at MTS cost $82,000, including salary advance and airfares. It also proved fatal for Millennium People. The recruitment agency had closed its doors by late July.
As for Davy, after serving 13 weeks of his sentence, he was deported in August 2002, leaving red faces, a mess at MTS and a warning to every employer: if someone sounds good to be true, they’re probably a grifter from Whistler.
