Taito Phillip Field is a naive and unsophisticated man but not a criminal who took advantage of Thai tradesmen seeking immigration help, his lawyer told a jury today.
Field's lawyer Paul Davison QC said the former Mangere MP was a man of "immense humanity" who often helped others and would have made a remarkable change in his character to have committed the criminal acts that prosecutors said he did.
Mr Davison was delivering his closing address to the 10-person jury at the High Court in Auckland, which will decide whether Field is guilty of 35 criminal charges.
Field faces 12 charges of corruptly accepting work on several of his houses by Thai tradesmen as a bribe in return for his immigration assistance.
He also faces 23 charges of wilfully attempting to obstruct or pervert the course of justice by taking measures to derail investigations into his activity.
Mr Davison said Field had spent most of his adult life giving service to fellow citizens and had led an exemplary life without offending of any kind.
He said the crown was asking jurors to believe that despite this, "suddenly, in December 2003, he decided to put all that aside and embark upon what...was a sustained period of criminal conduct."
Mr Davison said that though he had achieved a lot during his life, including 15 years as Mangere MP, Field was "unsophisticated".
"He is a generous person, a very humane person, a very kind person, a very trusting person, but a particularly naive person for all that."
Mr Davison said a central plank of criminal law was that an offender was acting deliberately, and that it did not hold people accountable for actions which were not intentional.
He said there was no evidence Field ever suggested to any Thais that they should work for him for free in exchange for immigration help.
Jurors were instead being asked to infer Field accepted work on his homes in the understanding that it was being done as a bribe, a contention Field strenuously denied, he said.
"He has never admitted or acknowledged that he ever knew or appreciated that the Thai tradesmen were not charging, or that the reason was that they were using that as a bribe," Mr Davison said.
"He paid what he was asked to pay when he was asked to pay it. He did not appreciate that the work was not all being charged for, and because he didn't pay a lot of attention to detail, matters slid."
Mr Davison described Field as "shambolic" in some of his record-keeping, something which explained his lack of records of payments to the Thai tradesmen.
"He doesn't keep every record at all and doesn't maintain careful files in the way you might think a good administrator would."
Mr Davison said Field's attempts once an inquiry into his activity was launched to create records of payments to the tradesmen was done to show what had actually happened and not to send investigators down the wrong path.
He said there had also been evidence that in Thai culture, people would give something to a person who by their actions had demonstrated they have cared for you.
This happened particularly if they were a person in a position of authority who had gone beyond the strict bounds of duty.
This was not regarded as a bribe and it appeared that this is what had been offered in the case before jurors, Mr Davison said.
He described the crown case as "a refashioning of the events and an interpretation of the events that has presented a distorted and incorrect version of what was actually taking place".
Mr Davison's closing address in a trial which is now in its fourth month is expected to finish tomorrow.
The jury is expected to retire to consider its verdict late this week.
