Dairy scientist loses bid for fraud retrial

A dairy scientist jailed for fraud has failed to win a retrial after the Court of Appeal dismissed his claim that he was let down by his lawyer.

The court instead found Trevor James Lock faced inevitable guilty verdicts and should have surrendered himself to the mercy of a judge.

Claiming a miscarriage of justice, Lock took his case to the Appeal Court in July trying to win a retrial after being found guilty of 20 fraud charges, including forging bank statements and providing false information to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). He was jailed for six years in 2017. Lock’s offending was between May 2012 and October 2015, when he entered contracts to supply dairy and honey products to seven customers on behalf of his companies, Nubiotics and Nu-Brands.

Lock worked with colostrum, a nutrient-rich and valuable fluid high in proteins produced by cows after calving. But he ran into financial difficulties and began using customer deposits from contracts to fund personal and other business expenses before failing to deliver on the deals.

He was arrested in Morrinsville in December 2015 after an SFO investigation. By the end of the fraud, Lock’s customers had lost $650,000.

Despite little of the evidence against him being disputed, Lock told the Court of Appeal his lawyer, Jeremy Bioletti, had failed to allow him to testify, present the defence he wanted or call certain witnesses.

Lock also said Bioletti did not fully explain his right to trial by jury, rather than a judge alone.

Bioletti flatly rejected the claims. He said Lock told him he had made false representations and deceived his victims.

Lock’s “defence” was that he was expecting a large sum of money — notably from China, India and Russia — which would repay the customers.

In their appeal decision , Justices Forrie Miller, Mary Peters and Mark Woolford were satisfied Lock admitted making false statements which could only have been made with the intention of deceiving clients.

The Court of Appeal judges agreed with the trial judge, Russell Collins, that the prosecution’s case was “unanswerable and the verdicts inevitable”.

While the Court of Appeal dismissed Lock’s challenge against convictions it did allow an appeal, in part, of his sentence.

His cumulative sentence on the charges of providing false information to the SFO will now be served concurrently with three other charges resulting in a sentence of five and a half years’ imprisonment.