Former administrator acquitted of all charges

A former Taranaki cab company employee has been acquitted of nine charges of deliberately altering taxi vouchers for financial gain.

Following a two-and-a-half day judge-alone trial in the New Plymouth District Court, Judge Garry Barkle found Irene Ann Rose Jarkiewicz not guilty of the charges yesterday.

After hearing the verdict, the 61-year-old smiled and hugged her lawyer, Megan Boyd. She then removed her glasses to wipe tears from her eyes before leaving the courtroom.

Nine charges of altering a document with intent to defraud were brought against Jarkiewicz, who had worked as a business administrator for Energy City Cabs.

As part of her role, she looked after company finances. This included processing taxi charge dockets, which act like a voucher and are sent off for payment.

She was made redundant from the company in 2016. During the last months of her employment, Jarkiewicz set up her own cab company called Pink Rose Taxis. Energy City Cabs was the parent company of this service.

A dispute later arose over Jarkiewicz’s leaving pay. While this was being resolved, operations manager Johannes Bekker started his own investigation, which included looking at the handling of the taxi charge dockets.

In evidence, he said after finding anomalies in three of a selected sample of 10, he went back and checked all of them.

Through this process, he said he found the Energy City Cabs’ number changed on a number of vouchers to read the number of Jarkiewicz’s Pink Rose Taxis.

This meant, once the taxi docket was submitted to the billing company, she was paid the money owed, less a commission.

The total money involved in the allegations was $440.

It was the prosecution’s position that Jarkiewicz was guilty of the charges as she had the opportunity to access the vouchers in order to change them and her company was the recipient of the money.

Mutual ill-feeling between Jarkiewicz and the cab company’s owner, Angela DewarReeves, was detailed through evidence in the trial.

It was heard that DewarReeves blamed Jarkiewicz for the company’s financial troubles, having accused her on two occasions of ripping the company off by thousands of dollars.

Jarkiewicz was said to have been devastated by her redundancy.

While the defence accepted the vouchers’ cab numbers had been altered, Boyd argued it was not Jarkiewicz who had made the changes.

She suggested either DewarReeves or Bekker had made the alterations.

But considering a number of months had passed between the vouchers being amended and Dewar-Reeves contacting police in mid-2017, Judge Barkle said that accusation was ‘‘a long bow to draw’’.

Barkle said while the straightforward facts pointed to Jarkiewicz being responsible for the changes made to the vouchers, there was not enough evidence to prove she in fact did.

‘‘There was no secure way in which the vouchers were kept and dealt with,’’ he said.

‘‘It’s not out of the question in my mind that the change was made by some other person for some unexplained reason.’’