Theft

Stuff reports

A school deputy principal who pawned a school laptop to fuel her gambling addiction has been censured by the Teachers Council.

The intermediate school teacher, who was not named in the decision, blamed her gambling addiction and grief over the death of her father for the 2008 theft.

The unidentified school did not know she had pawned off the laptop for money until two years later when she was asked to return it for IT purposes.

She then lied to her principal, saying the laptop had been stolen from her car.

Gambling, stealing, lying to an employer about theft and gambling, it’s another high quality teacher protected by the PPTA and the Teachers Council to continue her gambling fueled rampage.   Read more »

The Herald reports:

Two people who stole a charity donation box from a Hastings petrol station have been described as the “lowest of the low” by police.

Security camera footage taken at the Heretaunga St business on January 11 shows two people approaching the counter and asking to buy cigarettes.

While the attendant’s back is turned, one takes a donation box for Riding for the Disabled off the counter and stuffs it inside his hoodie.   Read more »

NZ Herald has a report on a recent dognapping where  Jasmine Beaumont-Morgan’s dog Poppy had been taken and a $30 ransom was demanded via a txt message to a number  found on its collar:

The man in possession of Poppy arranged a meeting at Homai train station. He refused to give Beaumont-Morgan his address. “We didn’t know what these people were going to do to her or us when we arrived.

”The man’s bizarre ransom fee was no joke, and he waited for Beaumont-Morgan at the station, his three children in tow. “He was passing it onto the next generation that this was the right thing to do,” Beaumont-Morgan said.

Jasmine Beaumont-Morgan collected sufficient information from the meeting to report the man to Police.

[Jasmine] called police the next day for an update and was told the man had been given a warning

A warning?

But then the article gets interesting.  It turns out, dognappings are on the rise, I mean even senior office holder Nats are playing in the dog-napping game:

Dognappings have been reported in Invercargill, Christchurch and Timaru this year. And in Queenstown this May, miscreants stalked a man and his Rottweiler before stealing the dog…

credit: pawfun.com

Dognapping has its own Wikipedia page, and as a crime in the USA it led to a law in 1966 that eventually became part of the Amimal Welfare Act.

A cursory Google reveals that pet napping is on the rise in other countries too, and new industries that deal with prevention and recovery are starting up in response.

But $30?

Perhaps he has low overheads?

The NZ Herald reports:

 Two French tourists camping overnight in the Waikato were violently attacked after they were accused of not paying “rent” to their attackers.

The couple – who had parked their camper van on a rural road near Raglan – were woken in the middle of the night by a man doing a haka.

Five intoxicated males then accused the French couple of staying on private land and demanded payment.

After that, it turned ugly.

“The French male has then been punched and an attempt was made to drag him out of the vehicle before the couple had a variety of items taken from them and their attackers drove off. Though not resulting in serious injury, this is type of attack is concerning given the time it happened and the sense of isolation the victims would have felt.”

Looking forward to Hone Harewira’s justification for this?  Come on Hone, you know you want to.  This one’s sitting up and begging for you to explain how it was the French tourists that provoked this situation, and the brave warriors were within their rights under te tino rangatiratanga.  

ᔥ Stuff.co.nz

Stuff has stolen my photo and written a story based on my post (Don’t Come Monday) of yesterday about a staff member ”cocking up” a Dio school magazine. Despite the licensing on my blog being Creative Commons – Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike they have not provided a single link, or even a mention as to where they go the story and photo from. You can tell it is my photo because I blurred the faces. Given that Stuff actually named the gorl concerned when I did not shows they had no need to blur the photo. It is doubtful they could obtain the photo from anywhere else.

As readers can see I have attributed this post. You would think a responsible media organisation could do the same.

I think I will bill them. For want of a link they could have avoided that. Does anyone have an idea of going rate for use of photos?

A disgruntled employee sabotaged a commemorative booklet for his boss’ teenage daughter, drawing a lewd image on her photo that was then printed and distributed to her school friends.

Emily O’Halloran, 18, is captain of the rowing team at wealthy private Diocesan School for Girls.

With the rowing season just finished, she planned a 40 page booklet for her team-mates to celebrate her final year at the Auckland school.

The school’s ”purpose statement” is to: Be more than you ever imagined!

She unfortunately got much more than she imagined.

Emily’s father Martin O’Halloran, chairman of influential advertising group agency DDB, volunteered to organise design and printing through his business.

But a staff member involved had a dispute with O’Halloran midway through the project and drew a large, comical male genitalia on a photo of Emily posing with team-mates.

The drawing went unnoticed and the booklet was printed.

”It was a silly and stupid prank by someone who is no longer with DDB,” O’Halloran said.

Tomorrow I will be breaking a large story concerning a multi-million dollar fraud, bankrupts, lawyers, rogue directors, phoenix companies, liquidators, deception, theft, stand over, bullying, abusive correspondence, extortion, ripping off of multiple charities, missing assets, false documents, duplicate sale and purchase agreements, and “aggrieved” franchisees, private investigators, an alleged Yakuza hitman, false allegations to the SFO and a compromised Official Assignee staff member.

On top of all that I will be revealing which media personalities have had articles ghost-written by some of the players involved and the shameless involvement of lawyers and public spokespeople in manufacturing stories against other public figures.

Not to mention Current Affairs programmes who don’t return calls and refuse to look at evidence.

Who is “Sexy Boy”? And is he the same as “Pearhead”?

What was “Operation Kite”?

What was “the compromise”?

Where is the Maserati, the M5, the Ducati, the boats, the digger and the trucks?

Who is “Weeman”?

What do “McMillions” and “Lum” have against their business partner and why do they want to throw him under the bus?

This will be the flip side of everything you have ever read about this whole little nest of nasties.

I have the documents, I have the emails, I have the files and I have the hard drives and I have the databases. I will slowly but surely reveal everything and I will use as few of my own words as possible and instead use the words from the very emails of the people involved.

There is going to be hell to pay.

ᔥ The Telegraph

Someone out there has a bridge for sale…true they do…perhaps a NZ First member will buy it:

Metal thieves in the Czech Republic dismantled an entire 10-ton bridge and more than 650ft of track.

The gang reportedly arrived at a depot in Slavkov, in the east of the country, with forged paperwork claiming that the footbridge over the disused railway track had to come down.

A Railways spokesman, Pavel Halla, said the cost of the theft was worth millions.

“The thieves said they had been hired to demolish the bridge, and remove the unwanted railway track to make way for a new cycle route,” he said.

“It was only after they had gone that checks were made and we realised we’d been had. The cost of replacing the bridge will run into millions.”

Scrap metal theft has can cost millions to the victims.

ᔥ NZ Herald

If brains were dynamite this guy wouldn’t have enough to blow his nose:

From the moment Scott William Paton offered to help a friend steal nine tonnes of native logs from Carter Holt Harvey Forestry in Rotorua, the foolhardy scheme was destined to fail.

A comedy of errors unfolded, which included burst tyres, spilled logs and a $60,000 borrowed skidder (used in a logging operation for pulling cut trees out of a forest) that got stuck in the mud.

Judge Ian Thomas sentenced 35-year-old Paton in Tauranga District Court yesterday after he pleaded guilty to charges of theft and unlawfully taking a motor vehicle, namely a $60,000 skidder, in 2005.

Judge Thomas said that from the summary of facts it looked like a “Keystone Kops series of events” had occurred that night.

The judge told Paton his plan to help out his firewood merchant friend had clearly been destined to fail from the start.

Honestly where do we get these Judges from? …this one has given a veteran sholifter with a previous record name suppression because it might hurt her career. Well boo hoo.

A Hawke’s Bay early childhood teacher has won her bid for name suppression after admitting two counts of shoplifting.

The woman appeared in Hastings District Court yesterday and successfully avoided both a conviction and the publication of her name.

Two charges of shoplifting arose from separate incidents where she stole clothing from the same Havelock North fashion store in October last year.

Defence lawyer Bill Calver said his client suffered from a mental illness at the time of the offending and argued the theft had “bizarre overtones” and was “unlike most shoplifting offending”.

On October 29 the woman walked back to the store in question to re-offend wearing the very clothing item she stole from the business on October 1, he said.

He pushed for a discharge without conviction and said the publication of her name would be “highly disadvantageous”.

“Her career would be over,” Mr Calver said.

Last year she was given police diversion for further shoplifting after stealing four handbags.

Police senior prosecutor Andy Horne opposed suppression and claimed retailers had the right to know her identity.

She has a temporary mental illness that conveniently only reoccurs when she is stealing stuff? …it’s called kleptomania.

via the tipline, another correspondent writes:

“What is really going on with the culture at the Serious Fraud Office? It is an unhappy place to work. The management team and the chief executive are regarded as inexperienced and arrogant. In fact none of them – apart from Rhys Metcalfe – have prosecuted or been involved in a case of fraud (fraud defined by the Crimes Act standards not Securities Act matters) before joining the office. Nick Paterson literally screams at people at work. There are tears and divisions between camps of people in the office. The two teams headed by Nick Paterson and Simon McArley hate each other and each thinks the other is elitist. Nick Paterson’s team is called the “Departure Lounge” because everyone who joins the team resigns pretty quickly and Simon McArley’s team is called the “Koru Lounge” because they are seen as pretty arrogant.”