$6m secret of child porn hoarder

A Remuera businessman convicted of internet child sex abuse charges has lost a fight to keep his identity secret to protect his right to a $6 million inheritance.

Company director Malcolm Brian Lerner, 51, was named yesterday seven months after being convicted in the Auckland District Court on 21 charges of possessing and trading computer images of young boys in sexual poses and girls being sexually abused by adult men.

Lerner was a paid member of pornographic websites. The pictures of boys aged 6 to 12 involved sexualised poses and urination and those of girls aged 7 to 8 involved sexual acts with adult males.

In a judgment released in the High Court at Auckland, Justice John Priestley said the likes of Lerner, a director of Stodart Holdings and Stodart Developments, helped the exploiters of young victims financially.

He said defenceless children were inevitably damaged psychologically and the material appealed to paedophiles and sexual deviants. The material had been stored to a hard drive, and also transmitted, not just viewed or received.

In October last year Judge Philip Recordon refused to grant Lerner permanent name suppression. He sentenced him to 350 hours of community work on six trading charges involving the boys and fined him $1000 on each of 15 possession charges involving the girls.

Judge Recordon said then: "The public is entitled to know who the perpetrator of these crimes is without suspicion being cast on other Remuera businessmen who may or may not be in line for a substantial inheritance."

Lerner, whose name had been suppressed to that point, won continued interim name suppression when his lawyer told Judge Recordon the decision would be challenged on appeal. The Crown, and the Herald, opposed that subsequent action.

Lerner, not publicly prominent but widely known in the computer industry and a director of the former IT company Network Solutions, also indicated he would challenge the convictions and sentences imposed by Judge Recordon. The two challenges were abandoned.

During hearings last year the District Court heard that one ground for Lerner seeking name suppression was to protect his ability to inherit funds from a trust.

That could amount to $6 million.

But in rulings by Justice Priestley in the High Court, aspects of the inheritance, the impact on it of Lerner's identity being made public and other details of the case were suppressed.

In his judgment yesterday, Justice Priestley said: "For my part I place great weight on the principle that the common law criminal justice system is an open system always subject to scrutiny ... Scrutiny is salutary."

He said the nature of the offending, which he called pernicious, justified publication. "The computer user who offends in this way is outwardly anonymous."

But Lerner faced public shame and humiliation - particularly hard for a person from a privileged background.

Justice Priestley said media attention was inevitable "partly because of the nature of the offending and partly because the fall of a person from an elevated position is more spectacular than a smaller fall".

In the judgment Lerner was said to display narcissistic personality traits and "as such" had a predisposition towards depression. But Justice Priestley accepted Lerner was not a paedophile.

Lerner was caught as a result of a "sting" operation set up by a United States law enforcement agency.

The agency told New Zealand's Department of Internal Affairs and its officers, with the police, searched Lerner's Stanley St business premises in May 2002.

Thousands of picture files and 555 moving pictures were found in a seized computer. Over 20 per cent of the files were objectionable.

Lerner had stored images on his hard drive but was disturbed by what he was seeing. He took steps to bring some of the sites he was visiting to the notice of US enforcement agencies.

He had been encouraged to send images to a person he believed was a young woman but who he now suspected was a man.

In the District Court last year before his suppression fight, Lerner told Judge Recordon he had done something totally abhorrent.