Chapter Two Defective administration

Tampering With Evidence File No 6 is a confidentiality agreement, dated 16 April 1995, prepared by Paul Westwood, Forensic Document Services Pty Ltd (FDS), in response to my request for his assistance in establishing the truth regarding my claims that Telstra’s TF200 report was fraudulently manufactured in order the gain a criminal advantage over me during my arbitration.

Had the arbitrator allowed FDS to investigate the beer matter, this Canberra-based forensic unit may well have uncovered what Telstra uncovered on 22 and 24 May 1994: Telstra manufactured the original arbitration report, which is provided to the arbitrator, in order to blacken my character as a drunk unable to run a business. Of course, exposing this fraudulent conduct by Telstra during my arbitration, instead of trying to expose this fraud over the past two decades, would have delivered me the justice I was entitled to. However, the arbitrator disallowed me the chance to prove my case. This rebuke came regardless of me having assisted the arbitration process by allowing Telstra and their forensic documents specialist (John Holland) access to my diaries.

It is also important to note that, like the Westwood confidentiality agreement, the fax imprint on the two pages identifies the sender and the date as 19 April 1995 but the receiving party is not identified. Since the name of this legal firm was the TIO-appointed special counsel to my arbitration it is surprising that, when they saw these photos, they didn’t immediately and officially call for an enquiry into why Telstra fraudulently manufactured this report. There was, however, no such enquiry. It is also important to note that when I asked the TIO, in December 1995, to investigate this further, freshly received evidence, that request was denied.

A very sinister aspect of this story brings the intentions of both the TIO and the arbitrator into question, as they were alerted to the fresh evidence, received under FOI and confirming Telstra deliberately fudged their original TF200 arbitration defence report, six months after my arbitration on 28 November 1995 and within the appeal time.

John Pinnock, TIO, refused to investigate (see page 3 of Arbitrator File No /49), and he knowingly deflected the truth surrounding the late arrival of this fresh evidence in his letter, dated 27 February 1996, to Laurie James, the then-president of the Institute of Arbitrators Australia.

That 27 February 1996 letter from the TIO to Laurie James attacked my credibility. The TIO deliberately misinformed Mr James that I had telephoned the arbitrator’s wife at 2 am:

“Mr Smith has admitted to me in writing that last year he rang [the arbitrator’s] home phone number (apparently in the middle of the night, at approximately 2.00am) and spoke to [the arbitrator’s] wife, impersonating a member of the Resource Unit.” (See Arbitrator File No /49, page 3)

If I did write to the TIO, as he alleges in his letter to Laurie James, why didn’t the TIO produce my letter? The reason is, of course, that I never wrote any such letter. And just as deceitful is the fact that the TIO’s letter to Laurie James was copied to the arbitrator.

This conclusive evidence, which I supplied to the TIO before he wrote to Laurie James, is located in Main Evidence File No 26,  27, 28 and Senate Evidence File No 22 and File No 23. Who advised the TIO that I telephoned at 2 am? The telephone account for the evening in question (also in Arbitrator File No /49) confirms I called at 8.02 pm. It is bad enough to see the lies told regarding the actual time that I made this telephone call, but it is perhaps even worse to discover that my reason for making that call was concealed from Mr James. I had phoned the arbitrator to alert him I received, on that day (28 November 1995), vital arbitration documents I should have received during my arbitration and these documents definitively prove Telstra’s TF200 EXICOM arbitration defence report was manufactured to pervert the course of justice.

Later, I informed the TIO about my exciting find and that I tried to contact the arbitrator to pass on the news. I also explained why I gave the arbitrator’s wife the arbitration project manager’s name, instead of my own, to prevent her being alarmed. I asked him what he would do with this proof that Telstra had fabricated the beer in the phone story. The TIO responded flatly that my arbitration had run its course and he did not intend to involve his office in any further investigation. He said I should go to the Supreme Court of Victoria if I wished to take it further. It was exciting to read that Telstra staff proved beer could not have stayed wet and sticky for 14 days – the time between the TF200 EXICOM leaving my premises and arriving at their laboratory. It was already evening but, in the heat of the moment, I rang the arbitrator’s home number. His wife answered and told me he was overseas and not due to home for some days. I was caught on the back foot; in my excitement, I had not considered the arbitrator would not answer the phone. I assumed the arbitrator had discussed the Parliament House rumours concerning his use of a non-credible agreement with his wife. I thought if she knew who was calling, she might be afraid I was ringing to accuse the arbitrator. Impulsively, I gave her the name of John Rundell: one I knew the arbitrator was familiar with – that of the arbitration project manager.

Between 28 November 1995 to May 1999 (well within the statute of limitations), I continued to ask John Pinnock (TIO) and the Hon Tony Staley, chairman of the TIO council, to investigate why Telstra was allowed to rely upon this fraudulently manufactured TF200 EXICOM report. No one assisted me in this matter. Surely the arbitrator would have discussed my telephone call with his wife and been told by her that I had telephoned at 8.02 pm and I was, at all times, courteous and respectful.

Tampering with legal evidence after it has been provided to an arbitration process for assessment is a serious crime: in my case, that illegal tampering included the introduction of a foreign substance into my telephone after it had been collected by Telstra from my premises and then the production of a deliberately falsified report about that phone, which was then submitted to the arbitrator during my official arbitration process, supposedly conducted under the ambit of the Victoria (Australia) Arbitration Act 1984.  If this is not a crime, then what is?

How do you publish a true account of what really happened during a government-endorsed arbitration, where the arbitrator minimised the defendant’s financial liability – to the detriment of the claimant? How does an ordinary citizen expose this high-profile arbitrator i.e., Dr Gordon Hughes, who allowed his wife’s name to be used in a letter written by John Pinnock (the then Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman), to the president of the Institute of Arbitrators Australia, stating I admitted ringing his wife at 2 am in a letter when no such admission was made. Worse, Dr Hughes received a copy of John Pinnock’s letter and knew this 2 am statement was false and written to discredit my character and prevent the president of the Institute of Arbitrators Australia, Laurie James, from investigating my claims against Dr Hughes. Allowing his wife to be brought into a situation such as an investigation by the institute, while aware what was being said about the alleged 2 am phone call was untrue, shows Dr Hughes is clearly lacking in character. Why didn’t Mr Pinnock provide Mr James with a copy of my letter? Because he couldn’t: NO such letter was ever written.

Concealing A Crime

This sort of tampering with evidence, after a claimant has provided it to an arbitration process, including (again, in my case) changing that evidence into a different format, must really be one of the worst crimes a defendant (in this case, the Telstra corporation) could have committed against an Australian citizen.  So why, when evidence of this tampering was provided – twenty years ago to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (John Pinnock), the Chair of the TIO’s Counsel (The Hon Tony Staley), the Chair of the Telstra Board (David Hoare), and Telstra’s then-CEO (Ziggy Switkowski AO), was that evidence not investigated immediately? (see also Open Letter File Nos/36

After all, it was Telstra’s own internal investigations that uncovered this unlawful conduct during my arbitration, but that didn’t stop Ziggy Switkowski from accepting an Order of Australia award three years ago (i.e., 16 years later, in 2014) even though he has sat on this crime for more than 18 years now. The following nonfeasance link >  

suggests Zingy Switkowski and the new Telstra CEO Andrew Penn and chair John Mullins have a moral and legal obligation to investigate the criminal misconduct committed by previous employees during my litigation with Telstra

At point 3, in the conclusion of this bogus report prepared and signed off by Telstra’s Manager Technical Liaison Customer Equipment Division he noted:

“The cause of the fault condition has been confirmed by Telecom Research to be due to the presence of a foreign substance possibly beer inside the telephone case which directly caused the incorrect operation of the telephone membrane hookswitch . When the hookswitch was removed from the foreign substance, the telephone operated correctly. 

“The state of the telephone when received suggested that the telephone was not well cared for by the customer”

“If the customer had reported the liquid spillage when it occurred the telephone would have been replaced under standard maintenance procedures with no resultant loss of business”.

Why didn’t the Telstra board do anything about that evidence as soon as they discovered that it had been tampered with?  Why didn’t they immediately remove that evidence from their arbitration defence of my claims as soon as their internal investigation unit had clarified that Telstra had indeed acted outside of the law as exhibits Open Letter File Nos/36, 37 and File No/38 show? This clearly raised a most important question:  why has the Telstra Board not advised the current Australian government that Telstra has both a legal and a moral obligation to rectify these wrongs as soon as possible? 

Perhaps the most important aspect of the exposure of this fraud is that the findings from Telstra’s internal investigation into this matter also show that, although the phone was collected from my premises on 27 April 1994, it was not tested until 10 May 1994, a sixteen-day time-lapse that appears to have been the reason for this internal review of their arbitration defence on this matter. The findings of that arbitration review describe how the second series of tests were actually carried out between 24 and 26 May 1994, and those tests proved that wet beer (and wet coca-cola) that had been deliberately poured into my telephone, had all dried out within forty-eight hours, a fact that totally contradicts the so-called ‘evidence’ first provided by Telstra)?

Just as importantly, why is it that the current Telstra board has also done nothing about these proven claims, since they know that it was Telstra’s own findings that confirmed that my claims were correct, including my claim that the telephone that Telstra collected from my premises was perfectly clean when they took it away and so the ‘dirty, greasy substance’ later found to be ‘all over the phone’, and the ‘sticky substance’ found inside the phone, could only have been put there by Telstra employees, after it left my premises but before it arrived at Telstra’s laboratories?

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