Douglas Weal, Kenneth Miller defamation and criminal conspiracy was the name of their game

Douglas Weal, Millers accomplice and author of the emails to journalist Tony Wall.

As our readers will recall, after the publishing of our post on Detective Cunningham, we became aware of the website www.accforum.org. One of  that sites members, who preferred anonymity, wrongly deduced that this blog was the work of a local justice campaigner by the name of Dermot Nottingham. He or she then foolishly posted Nottingham’s contact details – that thread has now been removed, although we did grab a copy before it was deleted by the sites administrator Arron Wislang.

Having Nottingham’s contact details posted of course saved us some work. We telephoned him the following morning and had a long chat. Soon after that interview we did a little more research; ultimately concluding that elements within www.accforum.org certainly had it in for this bloke.

As the story began to unfold we received an email from yet another anonymous party with a tip. An on-line location where we would be able to locate documents that related to the Takapuna Bomb Plot. Amongst hundreds of exhibits we also found various documents that related to Nottingham and his business. The cache included emails, letters and what are quite clearly statements, some of them complete with signatures.

Fairfax Journalist, Mr Tony Wall

So we started to dig a lot deeper, and found that various parts of the conspiracy that we have exposed are clearly criminal offences. In this post we are only going to deal with one aspect of a much broader set of events that were clearly designed to maliciously harm Mr Dermot Nottingham, his reputation, family and business.

The plan inveigled two journalists over two years, the first in 2007, is a bloke by the name of Tony Wall, who works for the Fairfax New Zealand publication, The Sunday Star Times.

The second journalist, later caught up in this fly trap is a woman by the name of Fiona Rotherham, she too worked for a Fairfax publication, The Independent. In 2009 Rotherham penned an article A Bulldog for a messenger. Her piece  related to Nottingham’s investigation of some very dodgy dealings within a group of small finance companies in the New Zealand town of Nelson. Nottingham had written a critical analyses named the Mytton Report in which he had been highly critical of the companies involved.

Nottingham’s conclusions and the recommendations he made in the Mytton Report were much later acted upon. There are, according to media reports, various claims currently before the New Zealand courts.

Fairfax Journalist, Fiona Rotherham

Rotherham’s article in turn had clearly been written to impugn Nottingham’s credibility and that of his Mytton Report. Rotherham however came a gutsa. It appears that Ms Fiona Rotherham had relied on information that was sourced from none other than www.accforum.org and it’s members. Rotherham’s stupidity and the subsequent defamation claim cost Fairfax Media New Zealand a public apology, which ran in their papers, and a shit load of cash in the out of court settlement.

At the time Nottingham’s presumption was that Rotherham had simply logged into www.accforum.org and located the defamatory material herself. Lauda Finem have discovered documents that call into question Mr Nottingham’s assumption’s and perhaps even the integrity of Fairfax Media, their staff and its solicitors.

We believe that it is very possible, perhaps even probable, that Rotherham was contacted and feed the highly defamatory material by elements within www.accforum.org. If indeed either Rotherham or Fairfax had this knowledge when negotiating the settlement then they should have revealed the source of the malicious allegations Rotherham had been relied on; by keeping that information to themselves they had then put Nottingham in ongoing peril.

There is a commonly used new age expression, six degrees of separation and in a very small Pacific Island Nation that six degree’s of separation theory is most apt.

In an almost peculiar twist of  fate, part of the deal cut with Fairfax by Nottingham, given his often public profile as a campaigner, had been, that they assign a single journalist to research and cover any future stories which involved his work. The Journalist that had been selected, by the managing editor Mr Paul Thompson, was none other than the aforementioned journalist who had earlier dealt with Douglas Weal, Mr Tony Wall.

This choice in itself raises many obvious questions. Was it because Thompson knew what had really occurred with Fiona Rotherham. Indeed, was Paul Thompson aware of the fact that exactly the same set of events had taken place two years earlier, the only difference being that Wall had not taken the bait. Wall had obviously done his homework properly and managed to find out that what he was being fed, was a load of utter crap.

These and many more questions need to be asked of Mr Wall and Fairfax’s Managing editor Mr Paul Thompson. The reason Lauda Finem have formed this view will soon become clear. 

In November 2007 The new Zealand media had run a series of new’s items about this bloke Nottingham’s investigation (over a period of some eight months) into a fraudulent immigration scam being run nationally. The Sunday Star Times journalist Tony Wall in particular had written a special investigative piece; Money for Jobs immigration scam.

Justice campaigner, author of the Mytton report and Douglas Weals target, Mr Dermot Nottingham (left)

The information Mr Wall had obtained, with which to write his article, was in fact handed to him on a platter by none other than Nottingham himself – but then accforum’s Douglas Weal was not to know that when he wrote the following email:

Note: all emails are reproduced verbatim, there are many spelling mistakes and Weal deserves the credit

From: Douglas [mail to:douglas@planet.net.nz] 

Sent: Sunday, 11 November 2007 8:12 a.m.
To: tony.wall@star-times.co.nz
Subject: Immigration NZ

Weal obviously over the moon at Tony Wall’s decision to meet up and have a chat then decides to spice it up a little for Tony’s consumption; adding much more detail to the false and defamatory tit-bits he had levelled against Nottingham in the first email: