Chris Tennet hired serial conman Brian Hunter (inset) to work at his law firm. Between 2016 and 2022 Hunter stole $333,000 from Legal Aid Services. Composite images supplied
Chris Tennet hired serial conman Brian Hunter (inset) to work at his law firm. Between 2016 and 2022 Hunter stole $333,000 from Legal Aid Services. Composite images supplied
A lawyer who gave a serial conman a chance to work at his firm voluntarily had the opportunity backfire when the man stole $330,000 from the Ministry of Justice.
Lawyer Chris Tennet hired Brian Hunter to carry out administrative work at his Wellington law firm, Justice Chambers.
Part ofHunter’s role as a volunteer was to revamp the IT systems and apply for legal aid payments on behalf of the practice.
Tennet knew about Hunter’s chequered past, which included close to 200 convictions, most of which were for dishonesty.
Most infamously, Hunter was known for impersonating several lawyers and once a pilot.
Almost from the moment he began work at the firm, for which he was not paid, Hunter began stealing from the Ministry of Justice’s legal aid scheme.
Then, before he could be charged for the fraud, Hunter died.
Tennet, however, has had his own consequences to face after the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal found him guilty of misconduct for failing to adequately supervise Hunter.
Tennet was before the same tribunal in 2022, accused of charging a client $3000 for a report that should have been free, when he discovered what Hunter had been doing.
Conman Brian Hunter leaving court in 2015. Photo / NZME
After that hearing, Tennet discovered what a report writer would ordinarily charge for a report and found it at odds with how much his firm had been charging.
He went back to his office and looked at his accounts.
Tennent realised Hunter had been running a scam with the invoices.
He was fired and Tennet reported himself to the New Zealand Law Society. Hunter then died in 2023.
Tennet was prosecuted through the tribunal in relation to Hunter’s offending earlier this year.
He was accused of being “asleep at the wheel” when it came to supervising Hunter, who he knew had a history of dishonesty and fraud.
“This is not a case where Mr Hunter’s fraud could not be reasonably foreseen,” counsel for the Law Society’s standards committee, Sam McMullan, said in March.
By contrast, Tennet said he didn’t see any scope for fraud in the legal aid system, “I always thought I knew what he was doing … I genuinely thought he’d changed,” he told the tribunal.
“While I could never ignore that [the convictions], he was trustworthy enough to be in the office.”
The tribunal last month found Tennet guilty of misconduct and today it suspended him from practising as a lawyer for two years.
Tennet could have been struck from the roll of barristers and solicitors, but a two-year suspension is on the higher end of penalties the tribunal has handed out in recent years.
His lawyer, Warren Pyke, said in his client’s defence that he’d not attempted to hide what had happened on his watch.
Criminal defence lawyer Christopher Tennet leaving his tribunal hearing in 2022. Photo / Hazel Osborne
“Everything was uncovered, which goes to his credit,” Pyke said.
“He made no attempt to hide it, he let the light shine on it.”
If Tennet returns to practice, he would need to work as an employee of a law firm as opposed to running one on his own as he has done in the past.
At Tennet’s firm, it was Hunter who was tasked with applying for legal aid, as well as paying for various services to provide psychologists and cultural reports for the firm’s clients.
When Hunter started with the firm in 2016, he began skimming money from invoices and depositing it into his own bank account.
On behalf of Tennet’s clients, Hunter applied for legal aid funding for reports from three providers, whose names are suppressed, and submitted false quotes and invoices to legal aid services.
Hunter arranged for Tennet to pay the false invoices, which were paid into Hunter’s personal bank accounts rather than the organisations that had done the reports.
Hunter would then pay the report writers their original quoted sum and keep the difference for himself.
In some instances, he would submit invoices for reports that were never produced.
Between 2016 and 2022, Tennet’s practice submitted 124 invoices to legal aid. Of those, just six were paid into the account of the actual provider.
Tennet paid a total of $456,000 into Hunter’s accounts and of that $122,000 was paid to providers. Hunter took $333,000 for himself.
As a result, the fraud meant that many of his clients owed money to legal aid.
The Ministry of Justice told NZME changes had been made to the way legal aid was administered in terms of its checks and balances after Hunter’s fraud.
Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.
