TAMPERING WITH EVIENCE: PART ONE

Absent Justice

Published by?Lyn Fattorini

TAMPERING WITH EVIDENCE: PART ONE

Tampering with evidence is a crime; tampering with evidence after it has been provided to a legal arbitration process for assessment is a very serious crime. In Alan’s case, illegal tampering with evidence included the introduction of a foreign substance into his telephone after then-government-owned Telstra collected it from his premises. Telstra then produced a deliberately falsified report about that phone and submitted it to the arbitrator.

After his arbitration began, Alan discussed a hang-up fault with AUSTEL’s Cliff Mathieson (AUSTEL was then the government’s telecommunications regulatory authority). Mr Mathieson and Alan carried out a series of tests on Alan’s phone line. When Alan hung up his TF200 phone and counted aloud, Mr Mathieson could still hear him. They repeated the test and got the same results.

Alan replaced the phone with another, repeated the test – and they got the same results, suggesting the fault was not in the phone itself, but somewhere in the Telstra network. Mr Mathieson suggested Alan discuss this fault with Peter Gamble, Telstra’s chief engineer. Of course, neither man knew then that Peter Gamble was one of the men Lindsay White named as saying Telstra must stop the COT claimants “at all costs” from proving their claims ((see:- pages 36 and 38?Senate – Parliament of Australia).

Mr Gamble performed the same phone line tests with Alan and arranged for collection of the phone for testing purposes. Ross Anderson, a Telstra technician collected the phone on 27 April 1994, then tested the fax phone at least 18 times in Portland without it once displaying the lock-up fault (see Telstra fault memo Tampering With Evidence File No/1-C). After Mr Anderson’s testing, the phone took a further nine days to reach Telstra’s laboratory, arriving on 6 May. Laboratory testing did not commence for another four days.

At point 1.3, under the heading Initial Inspection, Ray Bell, author of Telstra’s TF 200 report, states: “The suspect TF200 telephone when received was found to be very dirty around the keypad with what appeared to be a sticky substance ...” (Tampering With Evidence File No 3)

Photographs in Telstra’s report show the outside of the phone was very dirty. According to the laboratory technicians, when they opened the phone, the inside was wet and sticky. Analysis showed the substance was beer and the conclusion was that this caused the hookswitch to lock up. (Don’t forget: AUSTEL’s Cliff Mathieson and Alan had already tested two different phones on the line and still found the same fault.)

Alan was perplexed, as the phone was clean when it left his premises. He put in a request to the arbitrator, asking to see a copy of all the laboratory technicians’ handwritten notes so he could see how Telstra arrived at their conclusion. Alan appointed a forensic document researcher to look over the documents but, upon submitting the report, the only response he received from the arbitrator and Telstra was a duplicate copy of the report he had already received as part of Telstra’s defence. In December 1994, Alan received 24,000 FOI documents in a document dump from Telstra, (see Prologue/Chapter 3 - The Sixth Damning Letter cleverly timed for Christmas (when lawyers and arbitrators are on holiday). In the new year, with instructions to begin finalising Alan’s arbitration, the arbitrator refused to accept any submissions based on new evidence from this document dump. Among these submissions was evidence that Telstra’s TF200 report was deliberately and falsely concocted in order to stop the arbitration resource unit from investigating the line that Alan’s phone had been connected to. Six years later, the same lock-up problems were still present on the same line.

On 28 November 1995, six months after Alan’s arbitration ended, he received Telstra’s full report, which confirms Telstra carried out two separate investigations of the phone, two weeks apart, and the second test, between 24 and 26 May 1994, proved that the first report (10 to 12 May 1994) – the report provided to the arbitrator – was a total fabrication. Telstra laboratory staff found wet beer introduced into the phone dried out completely in 48 hours, with air vents allowing beer to escape. (FOI folio A64535-6 in Tampering With Evidence File No 5)

Telstra collected Alan’s phone on 27 April 1994, but it was not tested until 10 May – a gap of 14 days. Even though government-owned Telstra knew its second investigation proved the first arbitration report was fundamentally flawed, it still submitted the fabricated report to the arbitrator as Telstra’s true findings on 12 December 1994. (Tampering With Evidence File No 5)

For further information, visit absentjustice.com.../tampering-of-evidence.

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