Venning J. Won’t Throw Out Those Carbon Credits

Good grounds for an appeal I’d say. I wonder if it’s possible to make the judge pay the court costs.

Justice Venning disclosed his forestry investment interest at the start of the case and none of the parties raised objection. There seemed to be some aspect about this he glossed over. It beggars belief that this aspect makes him vulnerable to being ‘done over’ by IRD re his forestry investment if he gave an unfavourable ruling to IRD on the Trinity case, especially when the parties knew he had a forestry investment that ran this risk. Now Trinity involved tax avoidance at a ‘breath taking’ level, unlike most other forestry investments which are operated in a way acceptable to IRD. The problem here is he delivered such a devastating blow blow to Trinity promoters and investors that they are fighting the decision tooth and nail. This includes trying to have Justice Venning’s decision nullified and claiming ‘misleading behaviour on IRD’s part. As on ordinary long suffering taxpayer, I commend IRD’s efforts to crack down on blatantly abusive tax avoidance which was what Trinity was all about the case.

As was pointed out in the Chiropractors v Simon Singh libel case in UK, the court is not the place to decide scientific matters (imagine a court ruling on the Second Law of Thermodynamics). So all the court could do was to ascertain that NIWA had properly gone through the motions of doing research and publishing results. It could only get involved in the outcome if it was outrageously unreasonable – lawyers call this Wednesbury unreasonableness see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Provincial_Picture_Houses_v_Wednesbury_Corporation
(The Council would not let kids under 15 go to the pictures on Sunday – presumably the Council thought they should be at sunday school / bible class. While this may be an outrageously unreasonable decision in 2012 terms, it was a quite reasonable thing in the 1940′s).