Conspiracy

N. Guinea Timber

Lease

Four Men Charged With Conspiracy

SOME time after J. S. Garden was com mitted for trial on charges of forg ery, etc., in connection with the suggested issue of timber leases in New Guinea (see February PIM), the follow ing four men were formally charged, before a Federal Special Court in Sydney, with conspiracy to defraud Hancock and Gore Ltd., of Queensland: Harcourt Garden (son of J. S. Garden) John Smith Garden Edward Farrell Raymond Parer.

The hearing of the charges against these men commenced on February 23, in Sydney, and ended on March 10, when they were committed for trial before the Court Quarter Sessions.

The charges arise out of the circum stances set out in the hearing of the case against J. S. Garden; and the evidence in the second case was very largely a recapitulation of that heard in the first.

In the second case, however, it was the purpose of the Crown to show that the four men conspired to defraud Han cock and Gore ,Ltd., of the sums which that Queensland timber company paid over to them (£12,500 and £37,500) in the belief that they, as a syndicate owned a timber-getting permit which had been given to Parer by the Minister for External Territories. In the first case, the object of the Crown was to show that whatever document had been given to Parer had been improperly and without authority issued by J. S. Garden, who was an official in Commonwealth employ, and very closely associated with E. J. Ward.

AS in the first case, bitter clashes be tween the accused’s council and Minister Ward provided the news papers with headlines. The Minister re peated, substantially, the evidence he had given before—the point of which was that he had issued no permit to Parer and had given no one else auth ority to do so.

Ward denied that Harcourt Garden was his dummy in the syndicate; that W. M. Urquhart (whom he had recom mended for a high commercial appoint ment) was his dummy for the receipt of moneys; that he had ever had a bank account in the name of E. J. Brooks; that his share was £5,000 out of the £12,500 and £15,000 out of the £37,000.

Mr, Isaacs questioned Mr. Ward about the promulgation of a New Guinea ordinance.

He asked whether this ordinance altered the monetary qualification for workers’ compensation, and whether it had not been ante-dated to January, so that the widow of Mr. Ward’s nephew could get workers’ compensation.

Mr. Ward: That was not the purpose of the alteration; it may have had that effect.

Other evidence was brought to show that Farrell (a member of the syndicate) had loaned £2OO to R. M. Service, and Service lived next-door to a man named E. J. Brooks. The significance of this evidence, if any, was not made clear.

THE manager of the Bank of NSW at Collaroy, Sydney, V. K. Llovd, gave evidence that Farrell, an old friend, opened a trust account in his bank for

£37 000 odd. Farrell had said the per sons’ interested in the trust were Garden, his son, Ray Parer, himself (Farrell) and one other. Lloyd offered no objection to the subsequent transfer of the money from the trust account into a private account, because there was no trust deed.

Farrell, as far as he knew officially, was the only man he was dealing with.

A Court stir was caused when Service stated in evidence that Farrell had not told him he had personally seen the Minister in connection with the timber lease application; and then acknowledged, the following day, that he had told an untruth—that Farrell did tell him he had seen the Minister. The point was that the Minister had stated in evidence he had not seen Farrell. Service ex plained that he had given false evidence because he did not wish to embarrass the Minister.

None of the four accused men gave evi dence.

In their final addresses to the Court, counsel for the defence made sharp at tacks upon the Minister for External Territories (Mr. E. J. Ward) and argued that Mr. Ward must have known and approved what was going on in 1945, 1946 and 1947, Mr. Simon Isaacs (for the Gardens) attacked the evidence of the Minister whom he described as an “unmitigated liar, quite unworthy of the slightest cre dence in any court whatever,” on whose evidence “nobody would dream of hang ing a dog.”

Mr. J. E. Cassidy, KC (for Farrell) suggested that J. S. Garden was the in strument of Mr. Ward in negotiations over a New Guinea timber lease.