The comical farce of Cameron Slater et al

Written By: - Date published: 10:37 am, November 20th, 2015 - 43 comments
Categories: humour, law, parody, Satire, you couldn't make this shit up - Tags: , , , , ,

Late yesterday a judgement from the Court of Appeal was released and promptly written about by David Fisher at the NZ Herald. The salient points from the article are

  1. An attempt by the blogger Cameron Slater to use a journalist’s legal protection for sources has failed.

  2. The Court of Appeal has now rejected arguments by Slater that new evidence should overturn Justice Asher’s ruling and allow him to engage source protection rules for journalists in the Evidence Act.

You can read the actual judgement at the end of this post or from here.

In essence Cameron Slater failed in his bid in the High Court to be forced to reveal his sources:-

[9] Mr Blomfield sought discovery, and that interrogatories be answered. The former referred to “all email correspondence between” Mr Slater and other persons who were allegedly involved in the supply of material to Mr Slater. Those persons were Mr Powell, Mr Spring, Ms Easterbrook, Mr Price and Mr Neil. The notice to answer interrogatories included a question about the source of the alleged defamatory material published on Mr Slater’s blog site. The question was:
Who supplied [Mr Slater] with the hard drive and other information referred to on the Whale Oil website?

Slater had been given an opportunity to appeal to the Court of Appeal and had failed to do so in the time given. So he subsequently appealed to be able to introduce new evidence to that court.

Now for anyone who knows how the courts operate in NZ, this seems like a tall order for a civil case. The Court of Appeal has a narrow brief. It monitors the judgements of the High Court for the soundness of their judgement, and usually only deals with what was presented to the High Court at trial. As the C0A said in its judgement (I dropped the references and reformated the quoted – read the judgement for the original):-

[17] The Court’s approach to applications under r 45 is settled. The position was explained in Erceg v Balenia Ltd:

[The] requirements are that the evidence be fresh, credible and cogent. It will not be regarded as fresh if it could, with reasonable diligence, have been produced at the trial …

[18] This approach reflects observations made by the Court in other cases to the effect that litigants have a duty to adduce at trial all their evidence, which is reasonably discoverable and evidence which is not fresh should only be admitted in exceptional and compelling circumstances and where it is credible and cogent.  As with any other evidence, the evidence must be admissible and relevant; this is part of the cogency test.

Cameron Slater had to produce evidence that could not have been heard at the High Court trial, or it had to be credible and cogent to the case heard at the High Court.

This was and should have been quite apparent at the outset of this appeal to get leave to introduce new evidence. But frankly Cameron Slater and his small remaining cohort of associates are what I call “legal idiots”. They clearly didn’t understand this was what they had to do. They tried to bullshit and bamboozle three Court of Appeal judges! FFS how stupid can they be?

Much of what they produced was hearsay and even double hearsay evidence (ie I heard that someone said) which was immediately discarded by the court as being irrelevant.  And they really produced a stinking pile of other irrelevant and unrelated crap that the judges looked at.

The C0A judges kindly described much of it as

[19] Before dealing with particular aspects of the affidavits, some general observations are appropriate. First, it is often not possible to tell from the content of the affidavits whether they are addressing matters that have arisen since the judgment in the High Court. It is Mr Slater who has the onus of establishing that the evidence is fresh or could not with reasonable diligence have been discovered so as to be adduced at the trial. Failure to discharge that onus means the evidence cannot be adduced. Second, the affidavits are full of hearsay statements which cannot be admitted. ….

followed by an striking example of double hearsay.

[20] This passage contains double hearsay and is therefore inadmissible. It is also unspecified as to the time when Mr Price is alleged to have had the concerns referred to and so the evidence is not cogent. Nor is any explanation provided as to whether or not the evidence could have been provided at the hearing in the High Court, and so it is not clear whether or not the evidence is fresh.

[21] Numerous other examples of similar difficulties with the proposed evidence could be quoted from the affidavits on which Mr Slater seeks to rely, but that is unnecessary. It will be sufficient if we focus on the principal points that he now seeks to derive from particular passages in the affidavits.

moransIn my words, this was something produced by legal moron(s) dropping irrelevant faecal matter in front of the court. It is a tactic that is well known to anyone who has read the stupid crap that Cameron and his associated morans regularly produce.

In essence this left just a few kernels of possible material the could possibly have some relevance. Like all conscientious members of the judiciary,  the three judges picked through the dripping fecal mess that Cameron Slater and his moran associates had surrounded them with.

The first was that Blomfield had made  and succeeded in obtaining a  restraining order against Marc Spring, one of the people whom he was seeking to find the “email correspondence” with Slater, because of continued vile and toxic text messages (I read Judge Dawson’s District Court judgement Blomfield v Spring [2015] NZDC 5882). The C0A judges found that (my notes in italics):-

[24] We note that the text messages on which Mr Blomfield’s application was based had various dates between 13 August 2013 and 20 September 2014. Mr Beresford [Blomfield’s lawyer] claimed that the application was only taken at a point when Mr Blomfield was not prepared to continue receiving the text messages having earlier requested that they desist. In any event, many of the text messages were before Asher J, and addressed by him in his judgment, which was delivered on 12 September 2014. As we have said above, Asher J characterised them as involving Mr Spring sending Mr Blomfield aggressive and abusive text messages to which Mr Blomfield adopted a relatively defensive position.

Basically that the majority of these texts had been part of the High Court trial, and that they were addressed there. Therefore they weren’t new evidence.

[25] The fact that Mr Blomfield chose to apply to the District Court under the Harassment Act does not in our view amount to cogent evidence in relation to any finding made in the judgment under appeal.

Which is completely valid.

For Marc Spring try to hide his obnoxious digital personality behind a court simply isn’t acceptable. I’ve had to boot the miserable arsehole off here after having to remove the defamatory and just plain vile comments he has left behind in many different pseudonyms (and no, I won’t say what those were – read our privacy policy). I have also threatened him with pursuing a restraining order after he started wasting my time with abusive and idiotic emails that just displayed to me just how god-damn stupid and out of control he was.

The second nugget the the court looked at was from several affidavits from a Shiv Mutta. There apparently relate to a business dealing that he had with Blomfield and several others as part of what looks like a routine pleading and provision of token restitution of a failed business (of which Mattu was the sole director) to the IRD and liquidators. This is apparently, from the judgement, part of Blomfield’s current profession.

Presumably Mattu was in a bind for unpaid taxes to the IRD and missing and/or disputed money to the liquidators. Shiv Mattu was claiming that after the deal was made that Blomfield was being intimidatory. Quite how never became apparent in the judgement, as the statements in the affidavit look like routine warnings from a professional to a client about drawing too much attention to himself from the IRD or liquidators. Either could drag him to court if they thought they could extract more from him than they got out of whatever was plead for on his behalf.

The only interesting thing was related to a recorded phone conversation, which really just displays the paranoid incoherence of Cameron Slater and his cohort of similarly deluded dickheads. I will put it out in full because it is just so hilariously stupid (my bold at the end).

[33] In his submissions, the main emphasis Mr Slater gave this second affidavit related to the fact that Mr Blomfield had telephoned Mr Mattu on Monday 5 October 2015. Mr Mattu recognised the caller’s number as that of Mr Blomfield and decided not to take the call. Instead, he telephoned Mr Slater to seek his advice. Mr Slater was unavailable, but an associate, Mr Nottingham, advised him to take the next call from Mr Blomfield and to record it. It was then arranged that instead Mr Mattu would telephone Mr Blomfield while Mr Nottingham remained on the line and both would record what was said. That then ensued, the discussion lasting for some 26 minutes. A little over an hour later, Mr Mattu again telephoned Mr Blomfield while Mr Nottingham was on the line. This time, the conversation lasted a little
under four minutes.

[34] Transcripts of the discussion were then drawn up and attached to Mr Mattu’s affidavit. The presiding Judge in this Court asked Mr Slater to identify the parts of the transcripts of the phone discussions which were of most concern. Mr Slater referred to the following passages attributed to Mr Blomfield:

[35]

(a) Your affidavit wasn’t even written by you Shiv. I, the affidavit …
I’ve matched it up with the previous stuff that [Mr Slater] and
[Mr Nottingham] have written. Those guys wrote this affidavit for
you, and what’s going to happen when you have to stand up in
Court, and the first question the lawyer’s going to ask you when they
cross-examine you is “Who wrote this affidavit?”

(b) But what you’ve gone and done with these boys, and getting
involved with them, I wanted to ring you and make it clear to you
that I have no issue with you, and I wish you all the best, and I’m
sorry for what happened. But I’m not going to talk to you again, and
I’m not going to have anything to do with any of this, for as long as I
possibly can. If I’m forced to be involved, I’ll be involved, but I
want to stay right away from this, the people you’re involved with,
everything to do with it. I’m going to stay as far away as …

(c) As far as I’m concerned, you’ve gone and partnered up with the
devil, and you’re asking me … I want to stay as far away from you
and these people as possible. All I wanted to do was make it clear to
you that I am not going to do anything mean to you. I feel sorry for
you for what’s happened, and I’m sorry that things haven’t turned
out.

Mr Slater invited us to infer from the language used that these comments by Mr Blomfield were in fact veiled threats, that the observations were intimidatory and effectively asking Mr Mattu not to stand by his affidavit. We are not prepared to draw those inferences.

Which since Blomfield essentially said that Shiv Mattu was working with Cameron Slater and his associates like Dermot Nottingham, is something that any rational person would have said.

After reading some of the crap that Cameron Slater and Dermot Nottingham have put in front of various courts, I can testify that they do have a rather distinctive ‘legal’ tone. It is paranoid, delusional, full of fecal irrelevancies (bullshit), and with an ‘interesting’ way of arguing legal principles. It is like trying to listen to Jimmi Hendrix playing a National Anthem at Woodstock and inferring the words (or legal basis) from the distortion. But like that version of the Star Spangled Banner, it is largely an appeal to people who like them have no frigging idea about the law or legal process.

Anyway, Blomfield in those passages  said in essence ‘we’ve done our business, and because of the arseholes that you’re associating with I want nothing further to do with you’.

Seems like a fair viewpoint to me when one of them is someone you are suing for defamation.

Anyway, that appears to be how the judges saw it as well.

[41] The application for leave to adduce further evidence is dismissed.

[42] The appellant must pay the respondent’s costs calculated as for a standard application for leave to appeal on a band A basis and usual disbursements.

In other words, no appeal, and the morans reading Whaleoil can expect to get a further demand for money to run “the server” and to buy tee-shirts. I wonder how long their stupidity will last on this constant barrage of failure and bullshit.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Cameron and his pack of delusional “justice campaigners” in their pursuit of  ineffective pursuit of of power and personal adulation for their stupidity try to get this to the Supreme court.  But I fail to see any grounds that court will accept. Certainly I’d enjoy to their comedic antics continue. It is enlightening just how amusing some dumb some undiagnosed paranoid megalomaniacs can be. I look forward to Mike Hosking trying to top this performance.

But I guess in the mundane and functional universe that I inhabit, that I will just have to look forward to Cameron Slater finally have to face the defamation hearing in the High Court that he has been avoiding for years. I promise to come and watch… Bringing surreptitious (and metaphorical) popcorn.

 

A word of warning. The words “Dermot”, “Nottingham” and the “laudafinem” website are all banned in this post. Because of the mechanism used, that means across the whole site. Anyone using them irrelevantly or anything that I think relates to them will receive an immediate 8 week ban. You may use the first two, but only related to this case. Since they go into spam, I’m on the other side of the world and about to go to bed, it may take some time for them to achieve visibility.

Anyone related to the laudafinem or Marc Spring is unwelcome here. You will receive an immediate 5 year ban if I suspect your handle is related to them. This is because of their widespread abuse of the right to comment across several sites in recent days. Clearly they are upset about this judgement, but I don’t want that to impact on this post. There are other blogs that welcome paranoid delusions.

 

43 comments on “The comical farce of Cameron Slater et al ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. Molly 1
    20 November 2015 at 10:44 am

    Interesting post lprent. Just a quick edit may be required – Shiv Mattu is referred to as Mutta several times in your post.

    • lprent 1.1
      20 November 2015 at 10:46 am

      Cool doing it. It is later here than there. And I’m tired when I write these morning posts.

      Oh for a spell checker for real names.

      • Grant 1.1.1
        20 November 2015 at 12:05 pm

        *”In essence Cameron Slater failed in his bid in the High Court to be forced to reveal his sources:-

        Shouldn’t this read along the lines of: “..Slater failed in his bid in the High Court to be a able to protect his sources:-” ?

  2. Ad 2
    20 November 2015 at 10:45 am

    That Defamation Hearing will now turn into a slow celebrity roast for Slater.

    My hope is that a successful and high profile Hearing will permanently damage his noxious website.

  3. James 3
    20 November 2015 at 10:48 am

    The more I learn about law – the more I know to leave it to the professionals. Else you will lose.

    Bush lawyers can bluster and bullshit, and there is a place for it – in the pub, with mates, or even online. As soon as you head to court – you have to realise that there are a lot of people that know it a lot better than you. Always.

    • lprent 3.1
      20 November 2015 at 10:54 am

      That is why I listen to lawyers and then instruct them, and then listen to them, and then re-instruct them to get what I can get from my wants.

      But I always like to know how the legalities work, I suppose that comes from being forced through the law degree that my partner was doing while I was doing my MBA. The key thing I learnt was the limits and limitations of the inherent conflicts that were displayed in the case law.

      FFS: I can’t believe I’m agreeing with you James.

    • Tracey 3.2
      20 November 2015 at 11:42 am

      I also agree with you, and have had a sit down before posting this 😉

      Clients who think they know more than their lawyer are aright royal pain in the arse and usually dispute the last BIGGEST bill.

      I can see why Slater decided to turn to the Police/Crown and Key to fight his battle against Hager, it “only” costs us poor taxpayers, not him or his donating dupes at WO.

      • Anno1701 3.2.1
        20 November 2015 at 1:42 pm

        in my experience the collective “lawyers” of Auckland are a pretty motley crew at best , amd just downright freaky deek at worst

        Ive been to court a lot of times tho, which says more about me than anything else i guess 🙂

        • Tracey 3.2.1.1
          20 November 2015 at 1:53 pm

          Like any career, there are good ones and bad ones. I haven’t noticed that this profession has any more freaky deek than any other profession. Criminal lawyers have idiosyncracies… and sometimes, like dogs, lawyers reflect their clients 😉

  4. Paul Campbell 4
    20 November 2015 at 11:13 am

    rats – I was going to ask if D-N was a real name, it seems made up

    • Old Tony 4.1
      21 November 2015 at 8:12 am

      It is a real name. He appeared in Gisborne about 30 years ago with his brother (from memory) did some deals, got into strife and left town. Has appeared on TV from time to time as a crusader including (I vaguely recall) something about the issues involving importation of used vehicles. Seems to see conspiracies everywhere. My source is a long memory and too much reading of the news….

  5. Tom Barker 5
    20 November 2015 at 11:24 am

    And to think that the PM once paid attention to this thuggish oaf.

    • mary_a 5.1
      20 November 2015 at 11:38 am

      @ Tom Barker (5) –

      I wouldn’t mind betting FJK still uses and pays attention to Slater, when there’s some advantage to be gained! It’s what parasites do.

      • NZJester 5.1.1
        21 November 2015 at 1:38 am

        Not to mention that Slater is also the only person to receive an apology from the PM. There is a long list of others that have deserved an apology from him far more than Slater ever did yet have not received it. Not even the women who the PM claimed he would apologize to if he knew who she was and then refused to after she bravely reveled her name to the public.

    • Tracey 5.2
      20 November 2015 at 11:43 am

      and issued his only public apology to one of them… things that make you go hmmmmm

  6. Tracey 6
    20 November 2015 at 11:59 am

    Slater has confused the process of OIA’s under the current government witht he Judiciary and the Evidence Acts. Sureunder this government he can both get and delay information flows but now he is up against the Judiciary. His pals in Government can’t help him with retrospective legislation either, cos it might get their arch nemesis off the hook too 😉

    This would be funny if it were not wasting court time, costing Blomfeld heaps of money… and were not in such contrast to the police actions against Hager.

    I presume Slater is off to the Supreme Court now?

    • Grindlebottom 6.1
      20 November 2015 at 12:15 pm

      I know he’s an fwit but, honestly, surely he’s not that stupid.

      • Tracey 6.1.1
        20 November 2015 at 12:25 pm

        tongue in cheek

        People who think “I could have been a lawyer” and then behave like they are are, in my experience, bright in some areas and woefully dopey in others (the law being one of them – usually they try to make the law what they think it should be, rather than ging to Court based on what the law IS).

      • NZJester 6.1.2
        21 November 2015 at 1:43 am

        It’s Slater, has this illogical court case he just lost not already answered your question.

  7. Tracey 7
    20 November 2015 at 12:16 pm

    [27] is also worth a read in relation to the substantive hearing of defamation

    • lprent 7.1
      20 November 2015 at 12:36 pm

      Yep, bearing in mind where the burden of proof lies in defamation, and that these ignorant bozos putv their faith in bloody hearsay – I suspect that Slater will wind up on the wrong end of the defamation case.

      • Tracey 7.1.1
        20 November 2015 at 12:56 pm

        They do have on their side that Damage awards are historically low BUT are offset by a tendancy to award full solicitor-client costs.

        I presume Slater would have no compunction about declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying someone he clearly hates, or is hating on behalf of others?

        • Paul Campbell 7.1.1.1
          20 November 2015 at 1:14 pm

          that could be fun, anyone want to buy a slightly used blog site?

          • Sacha 7.1.1.1.1
            20 November 2015 at 1:41 pm

            ‘Soiled’

          • Trey 7.1.1.1.2
            20 November 2015 at 1:48 pm

            Ewww even if they brought in one of the decontamination units that clean up meth labs who would want to go anywhere near that used blog site. I shudder just thinking about what vile things might lurk there.

            • Paul Campbell 7.1.1.1.2.1
              20 November 2015 at 10:36 pm

              I’m sure there could be creative ways to deal with such a cess-pit: I’m kind of thinking one could auction off the user list to spammers, that would get rid of the worst part of the toxic waste. The business records and the email archive could go to Nicky, I bet there’s another book in there.

            • NZJester 7.1.1.1.2.2
              21 November 2015 at 1:46 am

              Well if he sold it the most vile thing of all will have already been removed.

        • Draco T Bastard 7.1.1.2
          20 November 2015 at 2:03 pm

          I’m assuming that Slater, like many others ordered to pay by the courts, simply won’t pay. He’ll probably also keep saying that he was in the right and the courts wrong.

          Accepting responsibility for their actions isn’t what RWNJs do.

        • Sacha 7.1.1.3
          20 November 2015 at 5:54 pm

          Someone presumably funded his QC to keep Dirty Politics out of the media for the couple of weeks before the election. Has anyone ever fessed to that? Or are we to expect that a silk saw this as a deserving pro bono case?

  8. AsleepWhileWalking 8
    20 November 2015 at 12:46 pm

    It’s a predictable outcome.

    PS good call on the ban.

  9. linda 9
    20 November 2015 at 5:46 pm

    are there other court cases lined up against whale blubber
    is there any chance we could celebrate a jailing

  10. Daniel Cale 10
    20 November 2015 at 7:59 pm

    Oh to be a lawyer, now that Slater’s here!

  11. Guerilla Surgeon 11
    21 November 2015 at 11:36 am

    It’s moron, not moran – which is something else entirely. (Unless I’m missing something) Might want to change that.

  12. Jeff 12
    24 November 2015 at 11:32 am

    This is my first time on a left-wing blog – I followed Slater’s one for a long time (cue a barrage of insults!), but discarded it when I learned first-hand that if you express even the mildest disagreement with the bloggers, then you’ll have your comment (and all previous ones) deleted and you’ll be banned. So much for free speech.

    So the comments you read on Slater’s blog are probably only a tiny sample of the comments he gets – anyone disagreeing with him is instantly banned.

    Reminds me of the South Park episode when Butters was hired to delete all Cartman’s negative comments and only leave the positive ones.

    One comment on this blog though – the blogger here should probably learn how to spell “moron” correctly if they want to retain their credibility.

    • r0b 12.1
      24 November 2015 at 11:40 am

      Welcome. Hope you find your time on a left-wing blog challenging and interesting.

      On the spelling thing read comment 11.1 just above.

    • Guerilla Surgeon 12.2
      24 November 2015 at 6:02 pm

      Hell, I was banned from Slater’s blog for correcting facts. Still, I regarded as a badge of honour really.

    • Guerilla Surgeon 12.3
      24 November 2015 at 6:02 pm

      Hell, I was banned from Slater’s blog for correcting facts. Still, I regard it as a badge of honour really.

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