Contracts signed by Michael Swann for a company to provide the Otago District Health Board with computer software licences and maintenance for Dunedin Hospital servers were "very irregular", the board's CEO Brian Rousseau told a high court jury in Dunedin today.
From his previous experience with IT and with the Manukau Health Board, he believed that if the contracts were run past a lawyer "they would not stand the test of a good contract".
And he described as "very strange", exclusions in the contracts which suggested the charges did not cover the actual costs of an engineer or any maintenance work and associated costs.
As to a service referred to as "opening the gate". Mr Rousseau said he had never heard of it before although he had seen "hundreds of contracts" during his time in IT and health board employment.
Mr Rousseau, who joined the board as CEO in February 2003, was giving evidence at the start of the second week of the trial of Swann (now 47), the board's form IT officer, and his friend and business associate Kerry Harford (48) for allegedly misappropriating almost $17 million from the board through the fraudulent use of invoices from Sonnford Solutions Ltd, a Harford-owned company.
The invoices charged the board $16.9 million between August 2000 and August 2006 for software licences and computer maintenance services which the Crown said were never provided.
But the accused say what the board was paying for was a risk mitigation insurance type of service whereby Sonnfords would call in the necessary expertise and services if a major problem occurred with any of the hospital servers.
During his evidence to Justice Stevens and the jury today, Mr Rousseau said he had never seen the contracts but they were for amounts outside Swann's delegated authority which was limited to invoices totalling no more than $200,000 in a year.
