Corrupt contractor’s assets seized
Property and cars worth $ 8.6m taken after bribery trial
A mortgage- free property portfolio worth at least $ 4 million, bank accounts containing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a classic 1963 Ford Fairlane are among assets of a corrupt roading contractor seized by police.
The haul comes from police efforts to seize the proceeds of crime following the country’s largest bribery prosecution where Stephen Borlase, the former head of roading contractor Projenz, and Murray Noone, a former senior manager at Auckland Transport, were last year convicted in the High Court at Auckland of bribery and corruption.
The case related to a pattern of payments from Projenz to Noone, totalling more than $ 1m over seven years, which Justice Sally Fitzgerald found were related to the latter’s role in awarding contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to Borlase’s company.
In February Borlase was sentenced to five and a half years in prison, while Noone was given a term of five years.
Borlase appealed against his conviction and sentence at the Court of Appeal in Wellington in a half- day hearing this week, and the justices reserved their decision.
Lawyer Ron Mansfield, acting for Borlase, did not return requests for comment about the appeal or freezing orders.
The freezing orders, covering assets worth $ 8.6m, were imposed on September 19 with the High Court justice agreeing with police they needed to be made without notice given the “dishonest nature of Mr Borlase’s offending”.
Justice Fitzgerald, in delivering her verdict in the criminal trial last year, had this to say about the week Borlase spent giving evidence in his defence: “In the main, however, I did not find Borlase to be a credible witness. The main reason for this was that, in seeking to explain the various payments and provision of benefits, his evidence often flew in the face of common sense and logic.”
According to property records, the three pieces of real estate covered by the order are all mortgage- free and all were acquired during the period of Borlase’s offending.
Projenz’s former headquarters oc- cupy the first floor of a building in a commercial park in Albany. The property was purchased for $ 1.41m in March 2006. The company for many years had former police officers who ran a private investigation firm as upstairs neighbours.
A three- bedroom house in Mt Eden, listed in company filings as the Projenz boss’ residence before his prison term, was acquired in December 2008 for $ 1.85m.
A two- bedroom house in Hahei, said in a police press release to be a bach, was bought in September 2013 for $ 750,000. Home on Disraeli St, Mt Eden. Rateable value: $ 2.1m. Bach on Harsant Ave, Hahei. Rateable value: $ 820,000. Commercial property on Corinthian Drive, Albany. Rateable value: $ 910,000. 2015 Mercedes- Benz A180. 1963 Ford Fairlane. 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in bank accounts. 2015 Mercedes- Benz A180
Ownership of the house and bach are listed in the name of Borlase’s wife and RLA Trustee Services No 51, while the commercial premises are in the name of Projenz Holdings. Police submitted to the High Court that these parties were “entities associated with Mr Borlase”.
Also caught in the police dragnet were three cars: a late- model Mercedes- Benz A180, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and a classic blue- andwhite 1963 Ford Fairlane.
The freezing orders also locked two bank accounts, at Kiwibank and the Bank of New Zealand, held in the Ford Fairlane name of the Borlase Civil Trust.
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