Construction giant fleeced by the truckload

Boral is not only claiming for the stolen gear but also for work lost and some of the cost of a lengthy investigation carried out by KPMG.

It is believed KPMG had a team of about six people working on the case for well over six months. There was also a hearing lasting several days in the Supreme Court and a long inquiry by NSW police.

According to evidence in the Supreme Court, Robin Knight, who ran some of the leading scaffolding companies in Sydney in the 1990s, would drive his trucks onto a site where Boral scaffolding was being used and simply take it away.

``Robin would go in, load the trucks up, out it would go," said Rees Ginns, Mr Knight's leading supervisor, who worked with him for 11 years.

Mr Knight would then either rent out Boral's gear, sell it, or use it himself.

As Mr Ginns later admitted, up to 80 per cent of the income of one of Mr Knight's companies, New Co Pty Ltd (now in liquidation), came from hiring out Boral's gear. On one occasion, the bookkeeper had told him New Co was making either a weekly or monthly profit of $40,000.

In an interview with investigators from Boral and KPMG, which he later supported under oath in the Supreme Court, Mr Ginns said Mr Knight's rip-off appeared to go back as early as 1996.

On the Goldsborough Mort site in the city, Mr Ginns said, Mr Knight would ``sneak in" one of his trucks to take the scaffolding.

Another employee, Wattie Johnston, told how gear was pinched from the Olympic Stadium site, the Moore Park Gardens development and the Toaster at Circular Quay.

``During the course of working on the Homebush Olympic stadium, I recall approximately 15 occasions where Knight directly ordered the removal of scaffolding equipment from the site."

Mr Knight told his employee that Boral ``aren't going to do anything about it" and that there was a ``no loss" clause under which a certain amount of scaffolding could go missing and no-one would have to pay for it.

Mr Ginns believed that his boss had some sort of deal with Boral.

``It just seemed a bit funny that all this gear was going missing and no-one said anything about it," he said.

When KPMG searched a number of Mr Knight's premises, they found a cheque butt revealing a $5000 payment to Maurice C Clark Enterprises. Maurice C. Clark was the yard and transport supervisor at Boral's Revesby yard and a good friend of Robin Knight.

Mr Clark admitted in court in May 2000 that Mr Knight had provided him with a mobile phone and had also paid for a holiday to New Caledonia.

Asked why Mr Knight did this, Mr Clark replied: ``He come to Karen and meself, who's me wife, and said we're going on holidays, I said, `I can't go on holiday, I haven't got a passport, he said `well go and get a passport, I'm shouting youse'."

Mr Clark, who admitted he had ``got the bullet" from Boral after about 27 years, said he had recorded the details about the loan and his other dealings with Mr Knight in an exercise book but he was not sure where it was.

He denied an allegation by Mr Ginns that he had been recording more equipment in the computer at Boral than was physically being returned.

He also denied telling Mr Ginns he had been involved in some ``rorts" with Mr Knight and others.