The Crown has told a Dunedin High Court jury that two men who charged the Otago District Health Board $16.9 million for computer-related services were well aware what they were doing was dishonest.
The board's former chief information officer Michael Swann (47), saw an opportunity to make money by charging the board for work he was already being paid $145,000 a year to do.
He then enlisted the help of his good friend Kerry Harford (48) who knew little about IT, to form a company which would invoice the board and the two men then shared the money, Crown counsel Robin Bates said in his closing address in the trial of Swann and Harford.
The pair deny three charges each of dishonestly and fraudulently using 198 invoices for financial gain.
Mr Bates said Swann was able to start rendering invoices which did not stand out and which got through the hospital payment system. And once the first invoices were paid, it was less likely someone would look at them so invoices continued to be put in for payment, over a period of six years.
The contracts on which the invoices were supposedly based probably did not exist when the first invoices were sent, Mr Bates said, some having been signed several years after the first payments were made to Harford's company, Sonnfords Solutions.
And the contracts did not match the invoices. What they referred to were non-existent or irrelevant items or ones already covered by the original base contracts with IBM.
And Swann had no authority to sign such contracts. He was well aware of the conflict of interest, that he as a board employee should not have been benefiting to the tune of millions of dollars Sonnfords was charging for services which were non-existent.
