Matthew Blomfield v Cameron Slater – The Day the “Boy” Who Cried Wolf was busted!

Yet again New Zealand’s leftist mouth piece ‘The Standard’ has out done itself and the target in its cross hairs is yet again Cameron Slater. Obviously its hard to say with any certainty who instigated the article but one could be forgiven for thinking that Matthew Blomfield, the purported author of the piece is not exactly what one would call a good fit for the Standards left leaning agenda; Matthew John Blomfield  a die-hard ‘Entrepreneur’.

That aside Lynn Prentice is obviously revelling in what he perceived as  the perfect opportunity to hang one on his nemesis the right wing Blogger Cameron Slater. Prentice’s piece purports to be an opportunity, granted by Prentice, for Matthew Blomfield  to set the record straight.

Lynn Prentice then introduces Blomfields statement with a little spin of his own, which frankly contains a couple of very misleading claims and at least one outright lie:

Matthew Blomfield, the defamation plaintiff against Cameron Slater who has been exciting the journalistic and blogging communities this week asked to make a statement to clear up some issues that have arisen in the blog space.

There was a lot of stupidity and outright bullshit (like allegations that Mr Blomfield was an undischarged bankrupt) in the comments in an earlier post that put this site at a legal risk (including comments from Cameron Slater). So I agreed to do it only if the post was fully moderated. Rational discussion without unsupported assertions of fact will be let through where they do not impede the case currently in front of the courts.

Mr Blomfield’s statement is as follows..

Source: http://thestandard.org.nz/when-the-wolf-cries-boy/

The outright lie is found where Prentice states:

 There was a lot of stupidity and outright bullshit (like allegations that Mr Blomfield was an undischarged bankrupt) in the comments in an earlier post that put this site at a legal risk (including comments from Cameron Slater).

There is of course the small problem of the subjudiceae rule which Prentice, feigning concern for the law, seems to have over looked when agreeing to publish Blomfield’s piece. There’s also the small matter of three court documents which Prentice managed to get his hands on and publish.

Who exactly was it that supplied those documents to Prentice? We can probably safely assume that it was not Slater.

That then only leaves Matthew Blomfield which would indicate that Blomfield had been in communication with Prentice for just a smidgen longer than Prentice has let on. Evidence of Prentices likely prior collusion with Blomfield, and his agenda, is to be found in an article Prentice himself wrote and published on the 3rd December 2013:

I think Judge Blackie got it right.

It should be remembered that had Prentice’s claim been true, that there were factual inaccuracies in the Standards comments section, Prentice had many options for addressing the issue, if in fact Blomfield had actually complained.

Prentice after all has never been one to allow comments that he, or for that matter his leftist cabal, did not agree with to remain in the Standards comments section; normally a gaggle of his halfwit supporters alert him to any offence. He then bans those responsible, almost always with the label “troll” attached.

In fact whilst Prentice fails to specifically identify the so called  “earlier post” one can safely assume that when it came to anything to do with Blomfield, post the Blackie ruling, Prentice has always made a point of stating that he would be moderating all comments:

This post will be fully moderated because I really don’t have time to waste on the idiotic assertion crap I had to moderate yesterday. It was half of the reason I dug into details overnight.

Source: http://thestandard.org.nz/i-think-justice-blackie-got-it-right/ 

So Lynn Prentice too, it would seem, loves a game of manipulation; manufacturing implausible excuses so as to ease Blomfields bullshit piece into the Standard without attracting to much suspicion or for that matter to many objections from his regular readership.

That didn’t of course stop another MSM hypocrite, John Drinnan, popping in to diss the Standard and Prentice, Blomfields decision to use the Standard for his propaganda piece, and of course Bloggers in General;

On this occasion we would agree with Drinnan (not that “Blogland” needs a regulatory body part). But it would seem a little contrived because Drinnan would have been well aware, since the involvement of LF (having obtained the same documents Slater had been given), that the MSM were now beginning to back away from Blomfield; he’d become an MSM pariah and its about to get worse.

Drinnen’s argument works better in reverse; that Lynn Prentice is the idiot for having, like so many others before him, succumbed to Matthew Blomfields wiley ways. But of course like so many other commentators Prentice has been far to focused on nutting Slater rather than getting to the bottom of it all.

LF have said it before, this is not about political agendas, its not even about right wing verses left, its about honesty, the truth and right verses wrong. Provide evidence and answer the right questions and the case is solved. We suspect that the Standard, its supporters, and Prentice in particular, will soon become a laughing stock and Slater ultimately vindicated.

Marketing whiz kid Matthew John Blomfields creditors, and there were dozens, were baying for blood by early 2012 and a group of them certainly had ‘the goods’ on him – “Matt” desperately needed a circuit breaker – and so reached out to his old mates in the MSM, the only problem? He lied like a fucking flat fish, and still fucking is!

Blow-hard Blomfield does indeed have “bigger problems” now that the truth will finally begin to surface….Click to enlarge

Of course LF have an advantage over Bloggers who have political leanings and the incumbent baggage that comes with it. We are not interested in point scoring or demolishing other bloggers so as to score political points. We are always far too busy wading through swaths of documents and, true to form, in this case, thats exactly what we are doing.

So Lynn Prentice selflessly decided to grant Matthew John Blomfield an appointment with destiny through Prentice’s loyal halfwit readership; so what exactly did Blomfield do with that opportunity?

Well not a lot really, just like the MSM he’s been feeding shit to for years, Blomfield squandered his once in a lifetime opportunity to garner a little more public support for his attack on Slater, bloggers, their sources rights and freedoms and obviously failed to convince anyone with a brain that he is a good guy who was unfairly attacked by Slater.

Whilst much of Blomfields statement focus’s on dissing Slater its clear that the only real argument that Blomfield attempted to mount used a “burglary” that, if Blomfield is to be believed, is when his hard drive and files were stolen. Blomfield had, in our view, on or about the 11th May 2012 belatedly sought to link an unrelated incident that occurred in 2010 with his now purported theft of files and a hard drive. LF will be providing more comprehensive detail on that particular unrelated event in an upcoming post.

Blomfield starts his self serving attack on Slater with a cleverly worded self effacing narrative whilst turning almost immediately to his recollection of the now infamous “burglary”, at paragraphs two and three:

In 2010 I was adjudged bankrupt on personal guarantees of $3.5 million. I don’t have a lot of excuses. I had too many interrelated companies. We made some poor business decisions. We simply ran out of cash and the whole house of cards crumbled taking me with it. Very humbling, very embarrassing. I have since been discharged from bankruptcy without objection and am slowly rebuilding my commercial life in a far more considered manner.

In the midst of all of my troubles, there was in 2010, a burglary at the office I shared with a business associate. I believed my hard drive was taken, by who I don’t know. The statement I gave to the police says

What was originally taken and what ended up in the storage container [a shipping container owned by my associate] I will never know. I can categorically say that a whole lot of boxes with my files and my stuff went missing and my mountain bike and other stuff went missing when the burglary happened.

A number of reasons have been offered up for why Slater has the drive. I’m not sure what is true, but the discovery I seek will answer that question. The fact remains, it was stolen, by friend or foe, and the information was accessed illegally. The law is very clear on that (storage and stored data are defined as a computer system). It doesn’t matter how Slater got it. My associate later left the company I was working for in the face of a very significant dispute with the other main shareholders, of whom I was not one. I certainly believed that I had been let down by him and said so. It was the end of a very close friendship as well.

Source: http://thestandard.org.nz/when-the-wolf-cries-boy/

As LF have already stated in another post  we doubt, for very good reasons, that a burglary took place as Blomfield has only now recalled and described in 2010, in fact we doubt very much that the police even bothered with a thorough investigation at the time. We know for a fact that many of those named by Blomfield were not interviewed during the preliminary investigation and that its only been as recently as two to three months ago that police for some reason have again taken an interest, started snooping around and asking questions. This somewhat, coincidentally, revived interest by New Zealand Police in a ‘criminal’ jurisdiction compliant dating back some twelve or more months, is in our opinion linked, for obvious reasons of advantage, to the progression of Blomfield’s ‘civil’ jurisdiction defamation tort against Slater.  

Cameron Slater has of course made his own views on this alleged burglary very public, he too has doubted for a long time that a burglary ever took place. Slater, in a piece he penned the same day as APN hack Bevan Hurley’s bullshit piece appeared in the New Zealand Herald, was strident in his condemnation of Blomfields claims of a burglary:

Well where do I start with this…let’s go through it from the beginning.

1. Your words, own them Matt. The hard drive is not stolen Matthew, even the Police laughed off your claims, as has the court. you know it wasn’t stolen and I know it wasn’t stolen yet the first statement you make is a lie. Why the Police never charged you with laying a false complaint I’ll never know.

Source: http://www.whaleoil.co.nz/2013/12/matthew-blomfield-right-reply-unedited/

As LF have previously stated, Slater is not one for minutiae and he fails to provide any details or reasons for his suspicion that the Burglary complaint had been fabricated.

Slater also fails to provide any plausible reason why the police, if Blomfields purported and media reported complaint was false, have failed to charge Blomfield for having made a false complaint.

LF has obtained a copy of Blomfields police statements (yes strangely more than one exists), used by Blomfield in the recent court proceedings, wherein Blomfield is “milking” the Burglary and theft of his Hard Drive to advance his allegation of defamation.

These so-called police statements hold a number of important clues, but we’ll come back to those clues and, failing a very plausible explanation, what looks to us like the police’s involvement in some pretty serious criminal offending.

Also amongst the cache of material that we received was an email sent from Matthew Blomfield to business associate and lawyer Mike Alexander in December 2010, Tuesday the 14th of December 2010 to be precise; wherein Blomfield clearly demonstrates that he has full knowledge of the whereabouts of one of his precious hard drives, the hard drive that he would later claim was stolen in a burglary.

In that email Blomfeild advises Alexander;

“Not sure if you have replied to Otis yet but could you cover off the following; I have a load of stuff from the office we had in town stored in a container (with Jiff I think)  can I have it returned. Otis has my iPod and a external hard drive that I loaned to Becca from accounts”:

Based on the date and content of Blomfields email to Alexander, Slater had very good reason to suspect that Blomfield had lied to police. The alarm would have further sounded for Slater when a piece, written by none other than the New Zealand Herald’s investigative journo David Fisher, appeared on Saturday the 12th May 2012, almost two years after Blomfield had sent the email to Mike Alexander; the article brashly declaring: Hell Pizza boss calls in police over emails

It certainly raised our suspicion that the police complaint may indeed have been false and a mechanism through which Blomfield had either hoped to recover his hard drive and its damaging content.

Theres an age old Roman legal maxim which is still used in contemporary legal circles with respect to evidence “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus” or in plain english “False in one, false in all”.

Simply put, if any evidence thats presented is proved to be false then a judge or jury is entitled to assume the evidence in its entirety is more likely than not false.

Slater had found that, as a result of what was contained in Blomfield’s email to the lawyer Mike Alexander, that Blomfields claim that he had been burgled ‘sometime’ in 2010 was fabricated. We here at LF would have, at that point, also been suspicious.

We on the other hand would have gone looking for further evidence that proved Blomfield to be a liar.

As we have already said, and here the chronology and various dates will become important to note; the New Zealand Herald first published David Fishers article on the 12th May 2012. In Fishers article (below) Fisher quotes Blomfield as stating that a burglary had taken place in 2010 and that a complaint had been made with the police. The date in 2010 is not noted by Fisher, Nor is it provided by Blomfield; We now suspect a very clever use of omission deliberately employed to muddy the waters, mislead readers, and arguably the other players in this little farce:

A bankrupt Hell Pizza franchisee has gone to police after a mass of emails he had sent and received were posted online. Matt Blomfield says the information posted online by blogger Cameron Slater was taken from his office during a burglary in 2010.

Fisher had obviously not been very thorough with the questions he put to the police:

Sergeant Grant Hand, of the North Shore police, confirmed a complaint had been received and was under investigation.

Now its important to note that Fisher, whilst giving the alleged burglary some prominence in his article, does not actually quote Sergeant Grant Hand as saying that police had received a complaint of burglary and that they were investigating it. Fishers important omission, at the time, was at best misleading and in the absence of a plausible explanation, one would be entitled to draw some pretty negative inferences.

The fact is that at the same time Fishers article was published the police had not received a complaint of burglary, nor is there any evidence that there had ever been a complaint received by police in 2010; which Fishers piece, arguably, does leads the reader to believe.

Fishers article was published in the Heralds Saturday morning edition and was posted online at 5:30am that same day:

We believe that Fisher had either been played by Blomfield or far worse Fisher had participated in a conspiracy that is only now beginning to fall apart. We base this belief on one very important piece of evidence: Blomfields first police witness statement. The only statement that had been taken by police at the time Fishers article was first published.

The very first police statement Blomfield gave the New Zealand Police comprises only two pages plus a coversheet It was taken by a police staff member R. Clarke (RCCJ16) at 7:45pm in the evening on Wednesday the 9th of May 2012, just 78 hours before Fishers article was published and as incredible as it sounds it contained absolutely NO mention of a burglary:

This is the only document that can be relied on to establish a key fact; that between Wednesday the 9th May 2012 and the time and date that David Fishers article was published, 5:30am, Saturday, the 12th May 2012, Blomfield had yet to fabricate the allegation that a burglary had taken place in 2010 and report it to police.

Now the timing and content of Blomfield’s second police witness statement is little more than extraordinary, frankly unbelievable, and inculpates Blomfield, and in the absence of plausible explanation, New Zealand Herald journalist David Fisher, in what appears to us to be a conspiracy to falsely accuse, amongst a myriad of other potential criminal offences.

Now as we have already said, Fishers Herald article was available online by 5:30am on Saturday the 12 May 2012. Unbelievably, exactly three hours later, at 8:30am Blomfield is back at the North Shore Police Centre giving another police Office, constable B I Sanderson, the second police statement wherein Blomfield, for the first time, mentions a burglary:

This statement is seven pages long, eight with its cover sheet, and frankly is extraordinary for a number of reasons, the least of which is Blomfield’s apparent audacity.

The first point is obviously the timing. When and why was it that Blomfield decided to embellish his original complaint (a suspected stalker) given on Wednesday evening, the 7th May 2012 , with the addition of an alleged burglary in 2010.

Of course Blomfields alleged burglary never happened and Blomfield was naming his mate “Warren” with a number of very specific motives in mind;

This very belated addition of an alleged burglary is just not credible. So why did Fisher include the burglary in his article if the police had yet to be advised?

One must therefore inevitably draw the conclusion that it was because Fisher had discussed the burglary with Blomfield before he had returned to the police station on Saturday morning and completed his second statement. The discussion between David Fisher and Bloomfield therefore had to have been sometime before Fishers print deadline on Friday the 11th May 2012, or did David Fisher request an extension to that deadline?

Having been heavily involved with the media for many years Blomfield had to have been aware that Fisher worked to an editorial deadline. Theres also another question; what role, if any, did the editor of the New Zealand Herald play in these events as they unfolded. Those questions need to be put to both David Fisher and the Editor as a matter of some urgency.

Blomfield it would seem was in possession of an unsigned copy of his second statement of the 12th May 2012, in our opinion somewhat suspicious; why is that? It’s certainly not a normal occurrence. No police force is in the habit of allowing a complainant who has attended a police station for the purposes of reporting a crime, who then when requested to do so, makes a statement, to then just walk out the door with an unsigned copy of that statement on police letterhead. Was Blomfiled being granted favourable treatment, why did it happen?

Blomfield however, in this his so called second police statement gives 2010 as the date of the alleged burglary, but no specific date, just 2010 surely you’d remember at least the month. even more surprisingly the officer allegedly taking the statement does not press him on this point. That for Blomfield would undoubtedly become a  serious mistake, even in New Zealand police tend to require complainants to be a little more specific in statements where they are alleging the commission of a crime.

In fact there are so many mistakes in Blomfields purported police statement that we here at LF are prepared to call it a forgery or fake; which ever word readers prefer; the document in our opinion is not a genuine police witness statement that one would expect to see in the circumstances, the alleged burglary despite having been given a great deal of prominence in David Fisher’s article is only just touched on in Blomfields second statement; this would have raised a red flag for any competent police investigator?

Further evidence that the so called police statement is a construction is to be found in the aforementioned chronology. The time and date that Fishers piece was published, Saturday, 12th May 2012 at 5.30 am, and the time and date on Blomfields purported second police statement, 8:30am. exactly 3 hours after the article had already been published:

Now David Fisher would have ordinarily required at least 24 hours lead-time so as to research and write his piece. Again its likely, as has always been Blomfields habit, that it was Blomfield who dreamed up, contacted Fisher, or another known Herald associate, so as to instigate the “burglary” article.

The so called police witness statement was taken three hours after the New Zealand Herald had already published Fishers piece where Fisher claimed that “Sergeant Grant Hand, of the North Shore police, confirmed a complaint had been received and was under investigation. So given that the police had yet to become aware of the allegation of a “burglary” exactly what sort of enquiry had Fisher made of Sergeant Grant Hand. Normally all media enquiries are made to the police media liaison office so theres bound to be a record of the correspondence; if not then the question would have to be why?

Another serious problem for Blomfield, and perhaps now the New Zealand Police, one that evidences that the time on the so called police statement are certainly not typos, they do however demonstrate serious inconsistencies in the events as detailed by Fisher in his article. Nearing the end of the statement Blomfield includes a paragraph wherein he details the fact that Cameron Slater had uploaded more damaging material on him following what could only have been the aforementioned article written by David Fisher and published in the New Zealand Herald three hours earlier at 5:30am on the 12/5/2012:

There are also a number of other documents that Blomfield has attempted to submit in his defamation tort interlocutory proceedings that are also cause for serious concern and a great deal of suspicion. One such document is the purported affidavit in support purporting to be from Constable Martin Guest but written, supplied and attached by Blomfield to his two police witness statements for the sole purpose of putting before the judge so as to substantiate his vacuous arguments:

According to the above unsigned affidavit Blomfield asserts, on behalf of Counstable Guest, that police employee, R Clarke (RCCJ16), is a police constable. We here at LF however have our doubts and feel that this may not have been the case. We base that belief on R.Clarks unusual police identity number; RCCJ16, assuming that the 16 is correct its should have been RC16 or RCC16, the use of the “J” is somewhat unusual.

Finally we come to an email that Blomfield purports to have sent Constable Guest, dealing with Guest’s refusal to co-operate in signing the affidavit Blomfield had written, incidentally LF does not believe for one minute Blomfield’s assertion, “I attach the amended Affidavit that you prepared. I collected from the North Shore Police station at 4:10 today”.

If it is, for arguments sake, true then constable Martin Guest must have had cold feet at the 11th hour. Then of course theres a couple of other questions that need answers. What email address did Bromfield send it to? Constable Guests private email account or his @nzpolice.govt.nz account, and did constable Guest in fact respond?:

When one considers the documents Blomfield himself has produced, and then the circumstances, the allegations and the chronology:

1. The first police witness statement taken at 7:45pm, dated 9/5/2012

2. David Fishers New Zealand Heralds article published 5:30am, dated 12/5/2012

3. The second police witness statement taken at 8:30am, dated 12/5/2012

4. The unsigned affidavit prepared without the consent of Constable Quest by Matthew Blomfield, dated as by an email of 2/8/2012 subsequently presented to the court

The only conclusion available, in the absence of any plausible explanation prima facie, is that on or about the 9th, 11th and 12th of May 2012 Matthew John Blomfield entered into a conspiracy to:

1. Make a false complaint and sworn statement to the New Zealand Police

2. In furtherance of that conspiracy knowingly arranged for the publication of falsehoods in a nationally distributed APN newspaper.

3. In furtherance of that conspiracy again attended a police station and made an additional false complaint; namely burglary, subsequently making another sworn statement to that effect.

4. With the intention of knowingly falsely accusing individuals named in the aforementioned sworn police witness statements

5. With the further intention of concealing a variety of additional offending, both civil and criminal in nature.

The facts and circumstances surrounding what we believe was a false burglary complaint of the 12/5/2012, as evidenced by the documents paint a very different picture of what had arguably actually occurred.

There was no burglary, as now recalled by Blomfiled, with the theft of files and a hard drive as he would have everyone he talks to believe.

Blomfield has belatedly, at some point between the 9th May 2010 and the 12th May 2012, fraudulently attempted to link a completely unrelated incident in 2010, with his false report to North Shore police, the theft of files and a hard drive, in 2012.

As LF have already stated we’ll be providing further detail in an upcoming post.

So with Blomfields “burglary” claim demolished he is left with fuck all propping up the defamation tort and the allegations he’s made against Slater, in fact arguably it might just leave Blomfield himself in a perilous position; with some pretty serious questions for which he now needs to provide plausible answers.

As an aside, LF have managed to establish that Constable Guest appears to be a close neighbour of Mathew John Blomfields.

Blomfield lives at number 7  Rame Road, Greenhithe, Auckland New Zealand and constable Martin Alan Guest lives at number 4 Windfal Grove, Greenhithe little more than a stones throw away. There’s yet another oddity. Despite there being no official record of Blomfield and Guest having ever met, Blomfield appears to have known constable Martin Alan Guests full name, Blomfield in fact used it in creating the affidavit he prepared for Constable Guest, which Guest subsequently declined to sign; was there a pre-existing relationship between this pair? Worth a little further investigation we would have thought?

Journalist David Fisher, the New Zealand Herald and its managing editor, as at May 2012, also now need to disclose all dealings they may have had with Blomfield or his representatives leading up to the publishing of their article of the 12th May 2012.

They need further to declare any conflict of interest whatsoever, inclusive of any preferential treatment APN may have received, whilst an unsecured creditor, in the settlement of outstanding invoices from any company with management or ownership links to Matthew John Blomfield or his known business associates.

We here at LF are continuing with this investigation and will continue to bring readers the results of that work, our opinions and conclusions. Mean while readers will get a better feel for Matt Blomfield in the below New Zealand Television marketing program interview. Unsurprisingly “Matt still didn’t get it”:

 

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