Another successful arrest of a lockdown criminal

The Green Party’s Tamatha Paul has recently been in the news for her calls to not only defund the police but also close prisons. There has been much biting scorn deservedly heaped on her head – my choice being to compare her plans to those of the anarchist CHAZ effort in Seattle in 2020.

But it’s also important to not let all this reaction slip over into unquestioning support of Police actions.

Nobody can forget the Police’s role in enforcing even the stupidest of the Labour government’s Covid Lockdown insanities – see the picture above as a NZ cop employs the Derek Chauvin restraint technique in 2021. You can argue that they, like the military, have to follow the orders of a civilian government, but the Military are explicitly not required to follow “illegal orders”, such as shooting POW’s, and in the case of the Police I had hoped that there might be one or two resignations at the highest levels which would give the government pause. Instead it was a case of forelock tugging in Wellington and “Whatever you wish Ma’am”.

But there’s also the case of the Police vs Salter Trucking, which, AFAIK, is still ongoing with the latest story I can find being from RNZ in March 2024 as legal wrangling proceeded before the trial proper began:

The amount of money a businessman and his family face losing as the result of a novel police action over a workplace death has been revealed – a whopping $11 million which would go in a first-of-its-kind “proceeds of crime” case.

And it comes with a warning that other businesses could be next if police are successful in this case.

As a result I’ve decided to re-publish my post on the subject from May 3, 2020, updating it a little bit because it got lost amidst the Chinese Nose Rot Pandemic. You can read the RNZ article but the following links are to one Mike Blomfield, who was helping them in 2020, and may still be doing so.

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A South Auckland businessman has been targeted by police who are using laws designed to go after gangs and drug dealers – the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act. The Police are using this to come after his family business, his home, and even his children’s assets – over health and safety issues at his business.

Matt Blomfield has the story here. As a side note, Blomfield is the guy that was attacked in multiple ways by Cameron Slater years ago, after which Blomfield pursued him through the courts. He ended up owning the old Whale Oil site, not that it was worth anything but it was a small measure of justice. Now he’s looking at another person getting screwed over, this time by the New Zealand Police Force.

In late 2015 I was introduced to Ron Salter who is the owner and founder of Salters Cartage, a South Auckland waste collection and recycling company.

A few months earlier, on September 15, 2015, Jamey Lee Bowring, an employee of a contractor to Salters Cartage, called Raceworks, working at the Salters Cartage business, was killed after the 100,000-litre fuel tank he was welding exploded.

It was a tragedy, a young man losing his life at just 24 years old. There were no winners in this story. I recall thinking about Jamie’s mother and how she would have reacted when she got the news. I have two daughters and in my mind I’m not sure if I could think of a worse situation than me outliving one of them.

Like all of the cases I work on, the first thing I try to do is understand the client. What am I dealing with and what is really going on here? 

Ron Salter is by trade a truck driver, who over several decades built up a very successful business. He is a hard man and initially that was all I saw. It wasn’t until I had spent a couple of months working with Ron that I actually found out who he is. 

Ron is first and foremost a family man, and Salters Cartage is a family business.  The kind of business that is the backbone of New Zealand’s economy.

The more time I spent with the Salter family the more I came to understand that this was the quintessential Kiwi family running their own business and Ron was that hard arse dad who secretly was a big softy and loved his family unconditionally.  

Just prior to lockdown I noticed a picture of Ron on his daughter’s Facebook page. He was in the swimming pool with his granddaughter. His daughter commented: “As a kid growing up I don’t remember my dad getting in the pool/water but little miss says “pop pop come in water” and he’s in”. 

That side of Ron is why, at the earliest opportunity, he said sorry for the accident and accepted he made a mistake. This was something Ron insisted on. 

Just over two years on from Jamie’s death, on November 23, 2017, Ron was sentenced to four and a half months’ home detention and he and his company were ordered to pay nearly $400,000 in fines and reparations, which they did. 

The same day a story was published in the New Zealand Herald entitled “Auckland business owner sentenced for fuel tank explosion which killed worker”. The story includes a video interview of Ron which captures the man I know and the hurt that he and his family went through. That’s not to say what happened to the Salter family could ever compete with losing a child. Jamie’s mother Sarah Ferguson has said she does not accept Ron’s remorse and I don’t think I could if I was her. 

My role with Salters Cartage finished up in early 2018. It was an interesting project, it touched on so many aspects of life, a mother losing a child, a business owner dealing with the guilt and responsibility for the part they played, the all-encompassing litigation process, something that I understand all too well, the toll that can take on individuals, and the support of wider friends and family unit that rallied around during this awful time. There were no winners in this story, but it was finally over. Justice was done.

Moving forward, I would check in with Ron and the family on occasion. They had a job to get on with and didn’t need my help. They were rebuilding their lives and getting their Salters Cartage family back on track. I heard through a mutual acquaintance that Ron was looking at selling the business and retiring and I recall thinking that it was not surprising. Ron had done it hard over the past few years.

Unfortunately for the Salters that was not the end of the story, as it’s supposed to be with the appropriate authorities. Incredibly the Police decided they needed to get involved.

Then in December last year I heard that the police had restrained all of Ron’s assets under the proceeds of crime legislation.  At the time I had limited knowledge of proceeds of crime laws and my immediate reaction was ‘what have I missed’? My mind conjured up images of drug dealing and gangs. It just made no sense.

After further clarification I realised that it was in relation to the same health and safety prosecution in which Ron and Salters Cartage had already pleaded guilty and been sentenced.  Having already secured a criminal conviction, the police had decided to take the extraordinary step of pursuing a business owner through the civil courts for the alleged “proceeds” of a health and safety offence.

I called Ron and he explained in a slightly panicked fashion, “they are wanting to take my house, my daughter’s house, the bach, the business, everything”. His life’s work and his legacy. I was lost for words. It just didn’t make any sense to me.

I recall thinking about double jeopardy – the principle that a person should not be subject to two prosecutions or punishments for the same offence. And then wondering whether a claim to forfeit assets constitutes a second punishment or a severely harsh punishment when viewed together with the original sentence. 

It was a major, the Salter family stood to lose a lifetime of effort. This was not just Ron’s business, it’s the Salter family business which includes the families of their 30 employees, who are essentially an extension of the family. 

Police have sought restraints over more than $8 million of the Salters’ personal assets as well as business assets over and above this.  An application to forfeit those same assets will inevitably follow. 

To be clear, this legislation was brought in to go after drug dealers, gang members, money launderers and other sophisticated criminal enterprises that break the law for commercial gain. It operates on a simple philosophy: the police say ‘we think you’ve obtained this by nefarious means, prove us wrong’.

Any legislation that destroys the presumption of innocence is always going to lead to situations like this where the authorities feel they can do whatever they like, and any law that allows guilt from a conviction to be extended to another, unproven crime, is enabling an even greater injustice. It’s the reason that prosecutors cannot show a jury any list of past convicted crimes of even the most hardened criminal; they must judge the crime presented before them and no other.

The reach of the legislation extends to anything that the police believe is “tainted”. The example I use is if a drug dealer owns a house and pays for a new roof with drug money, the police can take the house. The police can also take untainted assets to the value of the benefit they say you have received as a result of criminal activity. It’s hard for me to draw a parallel between a gang member selling methamphetamine and Salters Cartage collecting and recycling waste oil. 

As bizarre as it sounds, the police are saying the income that Salters Cartage received is like drug money. If it is, so too is the income of the hundreds of businesses convicted of health and safety offences in New Zealand every year, let alone other regulatory offences.  What’s next – resource management breaches? 

Don’t give the State any ideas, but actually I think this will be inevitable under a Labour-Green government, a further extension of the abuse of the law already seen in this case.

In the five years to July 2014, police restrained nearly half a billion dollars worth of cash, property, cars, boats, motorcycles with gold-plate rims and every other trapping of a drug dealer’s lifestyle you can imagine. Police estimated half of that came from methamphetamine. 

The recovered money goes into a contestable fund that has provided millions to drug and alcohol rehabilitation services, mental health services and crime reduction initiatives. Proper Robin Hood stuff.

Which is all good – for drugs and other types of organised crime.

However, in the Salters Cartage case the police are using the proceeds of crime legislation for the first time in the aftermath of a health and safety case.

What disturbs me the most here is not just the loophole that allowed this travesty to occur but that Police prosecutors were so unethical as to exploit it. The phrase, “have you no decency” applies here. The cops are not expected to be robots that just enforce the law mindlessly.

In an exit interview with the Herald just a few weeks ago, the former commissioner of police Mike Bush summed up one of the key tenets of his six year tenure as follows:

“How we apply our discretion is critical to building trust and confidence.”“The one thing people look for is the consistent application. And that’s what we’ve been driving hard.”

The joke here is that they were not being mindless robots either, for if they had been they would have applied the law consistently, as Blomfield goes on to point out:

If that’s the case, why didn’t the police attempt to seize Watercare’s assets, after the 2011 explosion that killed one of its workers and left another a double amputee? Or Canadian Piping, the firm convicted of failing to protect employees in the same blast. Should the directors of Watercare have feared that their family homes were at risk? 

There have been around 700 workplace deaths in New Zealand since 2011, and more than two dozen firms have been prosecuted for breaching the health and safety legislation where death occurred. 

Where is the consistent application of the law that Bush is so proud of?

You can read the rest of it at the link, which has been repeated across several blogs in case the LinkedIn account gets deleted. Blomfield sums it up thusly:

In my mind it’s just not fair. I really wish the police would use their resources, budget and energy to take down gangs and drug dealers because isn’t that what the proceeds of crime legislation was intended for? I can’t rationalise in my mind why the police have put the Salters family, and family businesses just like theirs, at the top of their to-do list, while many who have clearly profited from crime flaunt their wealth on Instagram. It just does not make sense! 

Salters Cartage is truly a family owned and operated New Zealand business. It is an example of what makes New Zealand great and what we need to focus on to get through this Covid-19 debacle. I am confident that the police will be unsuccessful in their case but my hope is that the fight doesn’t destroy this amazing family and the New Zealand-owned family business that was almost 40 years in the making. That’s not justice and not what New Zealand wants or deserves from the New Zealand police.

Ha! Sure, But it’s the Police Force we’ve got. Blomfield still has “trust and confidence” in them though, so Bush’s strategy has succeeded.