Valley Bluenose
RTV? Completed it mate!
The way that the Court case against Whyte was presented should not be forgotten.
Fraud cases are notoriously difficult to prove to a jury, consisting of common laymen and women. Most of the evidence is complicated and goes way over their head, so it is difficult to prove that a crime has been committed, beyond all reasonable doubt.
The case against Whyte should have been relatively simple to prove, compared to most fraud cases, but it was clear that the PF chose to make the trial far more complex than it needed to be.
The PF either made a huge judgement error in deciding how to present the case and lead evidence, or made a decision to deliberately present the case in a manner which was unlikely to gain a guilty verdict.
What particularly screwed the Prosecution case against Whyte - and all the others - was the fact that the Police, under PF instruction and guidance - messed up not one but two separate 'raids' on legal offices in order to seize evidence. They took 'papers' they were not entitled to take and the end result was that the Court directed that, as a consequence, ALL the evidence they gathered on these raids was inadmissible.
The judgement ruling on the evidence being 'inadmissible' was released and published shortly after the conclusion of the Whyte trial.
Having sat through the Twitter reporting of the Whyte trial for day after day, I remain convinced that this was why only Whyte was in the dock and why the Prosecution case was so inexplicably weak.