Brian Rudman: Davy affair's red-faced ones scuttle for cover

In Locking up sad-sack former Maori Television Service boss John Davy for eight months Judge Phil Moran said he was sending out a clear warning to other job hunters of the perils of fabricating CVs.

But to the outside observer, Judge Moran's message seems more the vengeance of a deeply embarrassed Establishment.

After all, what harm did Davy's inept conning do, except redden the faces of a string of highly paid employment agents, politicians and Government officials who failed to carry out a few basic checks?

As a result, the red-faced ones are now scurrying around trying to retrieve the $82,174 they foolishly paid or lent to Davy.

Now it looks as though we can add the cost of board and lodgings in prison to the taxpayers' bill. Could that have been part of the thinking of Davy's lawyer, Kahu Barron-Afeaki, when he proposed at the time of sentencing that his client be convicted, given a suspended sentence, then put on the first plane out of the country.

By demonising Davy, Judge Moran has given the red-faced ones the escape they were looking for. Indeed, hoodwinked recruitment agency Millennium People had a self-congratulatory press statement out almost before Davy was out of the dock.

"His imprisonment and the comments by the judge confirm our belief that Mr Davy is a sophisticated international conman who has woven a web of deceit."

What bollocks.

Whatever Davy was, he wasn't sophisticated. Unless, that is, your benchmark is the checking procedures of Millennium People.

Millennium People, which charged the Maori Television Service $70,000 to find four executives, should have smelled a rat during its vetting processes and didn't. Its people claim they were tricked by a sophisticated international operator.

But if it was so hard, how then was it possible for Herald reporter Louisa Cleave to flush out in her spare time on the internet the obvious discrepancies in Davy's CV. Like the fact that his mail-order business degree came from a university that did not exist.

If Cleave, untrained in the human resources sciences, had nagging doubts, why didn't the noses of the people who were paid handsomely to have them start twitching? And how is it that checks with past employers produced nothing?

As Judge Moran pointed out, this was a senior position. And a highly public and political one as well. Millennium People claims to have spoken to five referees. Obviously they picked the wrong ones. Or asked the wrong questions.

Anyone claiming expertise in hiring and firing should have known that the massaging and falsifying of resumés is widespread. HireRight, an American human resources consultancy, says that 34 per cent of the resumés it examined last year "contained outright lies".

London-based The Risk Advisory Group, one of Europe's largest employee screening firms, says 54 per cent of the CVs it screened in the second half of last year showed some type of discrepancies.

It's hard to let the MTS board and its chairman, Derek Fox, off the hook either. Millennium People told the board to carry out security and credit checks and it did not. Strangely, no alarm bells started ringing when the newly appointed chief executive immediately hit the board up for a $35,000 advance on his salary.

Didn't it strike members as odd that this so-called high flyer was not only short of cash but had no line of credit to a bank?

Of course Davy is a conman and deserves punishment. But surely the humiliation and ridicule he's endured since the story broke in this newspaper a month ago is revenge enough, even in the present pre-election frenzy for law and order.

He did, after all, give us a few laughs at the expense of Derek "holier than thou" Fox and the rest.

Also, think of the scoundrels who don't get locked up - the guys who keep being paraded through Fair Go, for example, ripping off old ladies over house and roofing repairs, or the guys on the other side last Sunday who were exposed repairing a tyre by shoving a piece of string into the hole and trimming the end flush with the surface.

Davy's crime was none of the above. It was that of the inept little conman who got away with his ruse for a while because of the ineptness of his hirers.

Police prosecutor Christine Scott said at his sentencing that Davy had "displayed either incredible arrogance or perhaps naivety that his credentials would not be checked".

She seems to miss the irony that his credentials were not checked. Not by those who should have, anyway.

His scam was inept and naive and he almost got away with it because of the ineptness of his hirers. He's hardly the big-time crim. It comes as no surprise that Davy has appealed the severity of his sentence.

Full coverage: Maori TV