Tampering With Evidence - 1
Evidence plays a crucial role in determining guilt or innocence in criminal proceedings. Tampering with evidence is a serious offence that undermines the justice system's integrity. Evidence tampering involves altering, hiding, destroying, or fabricating physical or digital evidence with the intent to deceive or mislead investigators, prosecutors, or the court. This obstructs the truth-seeking process and hinders justice, potentially resulting in wrongful convictions or the evasion of justice by the guilty.
This webpage is a work in progress, last edited 09-08-2024. It is important to note that we are still linking our exhibit files to the text, which should be completed by 10.08, 2024. Thank you
Chapter One
Tampering With Evidence
Tampering with telephone exchange and customer equipment before the arbitrator assessed it destroyed any chance of the COT cases' valid claims being evaluated on merit.
Casualaties of Telstra
AUSTEL (now ACMA) and the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman covertly supplied Telstra and the arbitrator with relevant arbitration information during my arbitration, which I did not have until years after the conclusion of my arbitration process. I was not the only arbitration claimant to have experienced this misconduct by those administering the COT arbitrations.
It will be apparent to the reader when viewing this website that indeed, in my case, had the arbitrator appointed to my arbitration been provided AUSTEL’s Adverse Findings, at points 2, to 212 and not the doctored AUSTEL COT Cases April 1994 Report, the arbitrator would have been forced by the enormity of the evidence contained in this government AUSTEL’s Adverse Findings, to have found in my favour before my thirteen-month arbitration began After all, how could Telstra have argued with the governments own investigation which was gleaned from Telstra's files. In other words, as their archives show, I spent $300.000.00 [three-hundred-thousand dollars] in arbitration fees trying to prove something the Australian government had already established.
Also being ignored by the government is that the Arbitration Agreement signed by COT Case Ann Garms, Graham Schorer and I was altered between 1:30 PM on 19 April 1994 and 10:00 AM on 21 April 1994, after our lawyer William Hunt and Alan Goldberg QC were each faxed a copy from the arbitrator's office as the final Agreement in which all parties had accepted as the Agreement we would be arbitrated on.
In simple terms, when the four clauses in Agreement 10.2.2, 24, 25, and 26 were altered, so it read differently from the original one faxed to our lawyers, the arbitration agreement should have been declared null and void, it was still used to our detriment (Refer to Chapter 5 Fraudulent Conduct)
When I phoned AUSTEL’s Cliff Mathieson, a public servant at the government communications regulatory department, to talk about this hang-up fault on 26 April 1994, Mr Mathieson suggested he and I conduct a series of tests on the phone line. He planned for me to hang up and count aloud, from one to 10, while he listened. This first test proved he could hear me count right up to 10. He suggested we try it again and count even further this time. It was still the same situation: he could hear me right through the range as I counted. Then he suggested I switch the phone on that line with a phone connected to another. I did this, and we repeated the counting test with the same results. It was apparent to both that the fault was not in the phone itself but somewhere in the Telstra network. Mr Mathieson suggested that, as I was in arbitration then, I should bring this fault to the attention of Peter Gamble, Telstra’s chief engineer. Lindsay White, a Telstra whistleblower, named Peter Gamble, in a Senate, estimates committee hearing as the man who said he and Telstra had to stop the first COT five claimants (including me), at all cost, from proving our claims (see Senate Hansard ERC&A 36, Front Page Part One File No/23 dated 24 June 1997).
Unaware of these orders to stop us from five COT cases (at all cost), I switched the phones back to their original lines and phoned Mr Gamble, but did not tell him Mr Mathieson and I had already tested two phones on the 055 267230 line. Mr Gamble and I then carried out similar tests on the 055 267230 line. Mr Gamble said he would arrange for someone to collect the phone for testing purposes on the following day. FOI K00941, dated 26 March 1994, show someone (name redacted) believed this lock-up fault was being caused by a problem in the RCM exchange at Cape Bridgewater see Tampering With Evidence File No 1-A to 1-C. Document K00940, dated the day the tests were performed with Mr Mathieson and Mr Gamble, suggests that Mr Gamble believed the problem was caused by heat in the exchange see (File No-B) where document folio R37911, states:
“This T200 is an EXICOM and the other T200 [which was connected to my 267267 line] is an ALCATEL, we thought that this may be a design ‘fault???’ with the EXICOM so Ross tried a new EXICOM from his car and it worked perfectly, that is, released the line immediately on hanging up. We decided to leave the new EXICOM and the old phone was marked and tagged…” (see File No 1-C).
On 27 April 1994, Telstra collected my so-called faulty EXICOM TF200 telephone. Documents I later acquired under FOI show that Telstra knew this telephone fault often occurred in moisture-prone areas like Cape Bridgewater. They also knew that the local exchange suffered from heat problems. When I received my copy of Telstra’s 12 December 1994 defence of my government-endorsed arbitration process, I found it included a 29-page report titled TF200. This document reported that Telstra’s laboratory testing showed that the lock-up problem with my service lines was due to my actual TF200 phone.
Six years after my arbitration, which was supposed to have fixed this problem, I discovered that this lock-up issue was not fixed, even though Telstra claimed to have investigated it on 27 April 1994. At this time, they disconnected the EXICOM TF200 phone from the fax machine. They replaced it with another EXICOM TF200, which remained connected to the fax machine until August 2001, when Telstra and I tested the 55 267230 lines again and proved that it was still locking up.
Photographs included in Telstra’s report show the outside of the phone was very dirty. According to the laboratory technicians, the inside was wet and sticky when they opened the phone. Analysis of the substance showed that it was beer, and the conclusion was that beer caused the hookswitch to lock up. The obvious implication here was that my drinking habits were the cause of all my phone problems. The laboratory technicians appeared not to know that the government communications regulatory department and I had already tested two phones on that line and still found the same fault.
Telstra FOI folio D01026/27 (Tampering With Evidence File No 2) confirms Telstra knew there were lock-up problems in moisture-prone areas affecting the EXICOM T200s manufactured after week seven of 1993. This document confirms that one of the known lock-up side effects of this problem was that, while the line was in locked-up mode, the line remained open so one party could hear the room noise of the locked-up party after the call was supposedly terminated. Document D01026 confirms that instead of destroying these faulty EXICOM TF200 phones, Telstra allowed their technical staff to re-deploy some 45,000 phones back into service in areas where local technicians believed moisture was not a problem.
During my government-endorsed arbitration, I received Telstra document FOI folio number R37911 under FOI. This document shows that on the day after retrieving the TF200, Ross Anderson, a Telstra technician from Portland, tested the TF200 EXICOM fax phone at least 18 times without it once displaying this lock-up fault. Telstra FOI document folio K00942/3 Tampering With Evidence File No/1-C
suggests the lock-up problem could have been related to heat, moisture, or both. There is no mention in this document suggesting that alcohol spillage might have caused this problem.
After Mr Anderson completed his testing on 27 April, the phone took nine days to reach Telstra’s laboratory. It arrived on 6 May, and laboratory testing did not commence for another four days. Ray Bell, the author of the TF 200 report, was adamant at point 1.3, under the heading Initial Inspection, that:
“The suspect TF200 telephone when received was found to be very dirty around the keypad with what appeared to be a sticky substance, possibly coffee.” (See Tampering With Evidence File No 3)
A second photo I received under FOI is a photo taken from the front of the same TF200 phone, confirming a note I placed on the phone was quite clean when it was received at Telstra. See Open Letter File No/37 exhibits 3, 4, 5 and 6.
This report raises several questions. When the phone left my office, it was quite clean. Why did it arrive at the laboratory in such a filthy state? How did the beer get inside the phone? Who would have a reason to pour beer into the phone and why? If the addition of beer was not deliberate, how did it get inside the phone? The main aim of Telstra’s submitted report, used as evidence, was to prove Telstra’s service was not at fault.
As soon as I read this beer-in-the-phone report, I made a request to the arbitrator, asking for a copy of all the laboratory technicians' handwritten notes so he could see how Telstra had arrived at their conclusion. I had appointed my forensic document researcher to look over the documents when I received them, and he provided me with his CV credentials and signed a confidentiality agreement stating he would not disclose his findings to anyone outside of the arbitration procedure. Although I passed all this information on to the arbitrator, the only response I received from the arbitrator and Telstra was a duplicate copy of the report I had already received as part of Telstra’s defence.
On 28 November 1995, six months after my arbitration ended, I received Telstra’s TF200 EXICOM report. This report confirms Telstra carried out two separate investigations of my EXICOM TF200 telephone, two weeks apart and the second test report, dated between 24 and 26 May 1994, proved that the first one, the report provided to the arbitrator, was not a true account of the testing process at all, but a total fabrication. Photos and graphs by Telstra laboratory staff proved wet beer introduced into the TF200 phone dried out completely in 48 hours. As mentioned above, Telstra collected my phone from my business on 27 April 1994, but it was not tested until 10 May – a gap of 14 days. Various pages (see Tampering With Evidence File No/5) confirm that, even though Telstra knew its second investigation proved the first arbitration report, dated between 10 and 12 May 1994, was more than fundamentally flawed, it still submitted the first flawed report to the arbitrator as Telstra’s true findings.
The marked Telstra FOI documents folio A64535 to A64562 (see Tampering With Evidence File No/5), are clear evidence that Telstra did do two separate TF200 tests on my collected phone two weeks apart. FOI folio A64535 confirms with this handwritten Telstra laboratory file note, dated 26 May 1994, that when wet beer was poured into a TF200 phone, the wet substance dried up within 48 hours. The air vents within the phone itself allowed for the beer to escape. In other words, how could my TF200, collected on 27 April 1994, have been wet inside the phone on 10 May 1994 when it was tested at Telstra’s laboratories?
Another disturbing side to this tapering with arbitration evidence by Telstra is that I was a volunteer for the Cape Bridgewater Country Fire Authority (CFA) for many years before this tampering took place. The following chapters show that during my arbitration Telstra twisted the reason I could not be present for the testing of my TF200 telephone at my premises on a scheduled meeting on the morning of 27 April 1994. Telstra only reported in their file notes (later submitted to the arbitrator) that I refused to allow Telstra to test the phones because I was tired. There was no mention in these file notes that I advised the fault response unit that I had been fighting an out-of-control fire for 14 hours or that my sore eyes made it impossible to observe such testing by Telstra. I fought the fire the previous evening from 6 pm to 9 am the following morning.
It is clear from our Tampering With Evidence page that not only did Telstra set out to discredit me by implying I was just too tired to have my TF200 phone tested, but after Telstra removed the phone, it was tampered with before it arrived at Telstra’s Melbourne laboratories: someone from Telstra poured beer into the phone. In its arbitration defence report, Telstra then alleged that sticky beer was the cause of the phone’s ongoing lock-up problems, not the Cape Bridgewater network. This wicked deed and the threats I received from Telstra during my arbitration are a testament that my claims should have been investigated years ago. So, even though I carried out my civic duties as an Australian citizen, over and beyond, by supplying vital evidence to the AFP and fighting out-of-control fires, I was still penalised on both occasions during my arbitration.
The other twist to this part of my story is, how could I have spilt beer into my telephone, as Telstra's arbitration defence documents state, when I had been fighting an out-of-control fire? I certainly would not have been driving the CFA truck or assisting my fire buddies had I been drinking beer. Reading this part of my story will give the reader some idea of the dreadful conduct that we COT Cases had to put up with from Telstra as we battled for a reliable phone service.
When I provided the arbitrator and the arbitration Special Counsel with a statutory declaration prepared by Paul Westwood s forensic documents specialist, who advised he would test the collected TF200 and inspect Telstra's laboratory working notes to see how Telstra came up with their findings regarding my drinking habits had caused my phone faults and not the EXICOM TF200 both the arbitrator and arbitration special counsel refused my request to have Telstra's arbitration defence investigated on the grounds fraud had played a significant part in the preparation of the TF200 report.
Concealing A Crime
This sort of tampering with evidence, after a claimant has provided it to an arbitration process, including (again, in my case) changing that evidence into a different format, must really be one of the worst crimes a defendant (in this case, the Telstra corporation) could have committed against an Australian citizen. So why, when evidence of this tampering was provided – twenty years ago to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (John Pinnock), the Chair of the TIO’s Counsel (The Hon Tony Staley), the Chair of the Telstra Board (David Hoare), and Telstra’s then-CEO (Ziggy Switkowski AO), was that evidence not investigated immediately?
After all, it was Telstra’s own internal investigations that uncovered this unlawful conduct during my arbitration, but that didn’t stop Ziggy Switkowski from accepting an Order of Australia award three years ago (i.e., 16 years later, in 2014) even though he has sat on this crime for more than 18 years now. The following nonfeasance link >
suggests Zingy Switkowski and the new Telstra CEO Andrew Penn and chair John Mullins have a moral and legal obligation to investigate the criminal misconduct committed by previous employees during my litigation with Telstra
At point 3, in the conclusion of this bogus report prepared and signed off by Telstra’s Manager Technical Liaison Customer Equipment Division, he noted:
“The cause of the fault condition has been confirmed by Telecom Research to be due to the presence of a foreign substance possibly beer inside the telephone case which directly caused the incorrect operation of the telephone membrane hookswitch . When the hookswitch was removed from the foreign substance, the telephone operated correctly.
“The state of the telephone when received suggested that the telephone was not well cared for by the customer”
“If the customer had reported the liquid spillage when it occurred the telephone would have been replaced under standard maintenance procedures with no resultant loss of business”.
Why didn’t the Telstra board do anything about that evidence when they discovered it had been tampered with? Why didn’t they immediately remove that evidence from their arbitration defence of my claims as soon as their internal investigation unit had clarified that Telstra had indeed acted outside of the law as exhibits Open Letter File Nos/36, 37 and File No/38 show? This raised a most important question: why has the Telstra Board not advised the current Australian government that Telstra has both a legal and a moral obligation to rectify these wrongs as soon as possible?
Perhaps the most important aspect of the exposure of this fraud is that the findings from Telstra’s internal investigation into this matter also show that, although the phone was collected from my premises on 27 April 1994, it was not tested until 10 May 1994, a sixteen-day time-lapse that appears to have been the reason for this internal review of their arbitration defence on this matter. The findings of that arbitration review describe how the second series of tests were carried out between 24 and 26 May 1994. Those tests proved that wet beer (and wet Coca-Cola) that had been deliberately poured into my telephone had all dried out within forty-eight hours, which contradicts the so-called ‘evidence’ first provided by Telstra)?
Just as importantly, why is it that the current Telstra board had also done nothing about these proven claims since they know that it was Telstra’s own findings that confirmed that my claims were correct, including my claim that the telephone that Telstra collected from my premises was perfectly clean when they took it away? So the ‘dirty, greasy substance’ was later found to be ‘all over the phone’, and the ‘sticky substance’ found inside the phone could only have been put there by Telstra employees after it left my premises but before it arrived at Telstra’s laboratories?
In my introduction, I state, ' The arbitrator ignored corruption and deliberate misleading and deceptive conduct by Telstra during their defence of the author's claim. The same arbitrator secretly sanctioned alterations to the arbitration agreement after the claimant's lawyers had accepted the unchanged version. These secretly altered clauses 24, 25, and 26 severely affected the claimant's chances of appealing the arbitrator's findings.
On the day we signed the arbitration agreement (see Open letter File No 54-B), clause 10.2.2 and the $250,000.00 liability caps in clauses 25 and 26 had been removed, and clause 24 had been modified. We were told there would be no arbitration if we did not accept these late changes.
When visiting the above dropdown bar titled Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman / Chapter 5 Fraudulent Conduct, I discovered that not only were the $250,000.00 liability caps removed from my arbitration agreement before I signed it two months later, but they were also replaced on all future arbitration agreements. I was never informed of this, nor were those removed clauses reinstated on my arbitration agreement.
I have always maintained our lawyers thought we were signing the arbitration agreement COT Case Maureen Gillan had signed two weeks before. I only agreed to clause 10.2.2. being removed. With banks declaring they were ready to take over our assets if we could not show imminent settlements, I buckled to removing only that clause.
No one in their right mind, no matter how much pressure was applied to them, would have accepted a compromise of such a magnitude. Modifying clause 24 and removing clauses 25 and 26 meant we could not sue anyone for acts of negligence. This meant the legal counsel to the arbitration and the professional consultants were now bulletproof. They could freely do whatever they liked when they liked, and there was nothing anyone could do. This website absentjustice.com shows this is exactly what happened.
Learn here on absentjustice.com about criminal conduct, unscrupulous public servants, corrupt politicians and the lawyers who control the legal profession in Austra
