Bali Ha’i cover-up claims

A prosecutor says alleged Bali Ha’i Cruises swindler Colin Beeck was trying to conceal his activities when he re-directed bank statements requested by his boss Dick Chandler.

Summing up the case against Mr Beeck in Perth Magistrates Court, prosecutor Kirsten Norton said Mr Beeck wanted to keep other people at Bali Ha’i Cruises in the dark for “as long as possible” when he had the statements emailed to himself.

She was referring to Mr Beeck’s actions in late July 2022 after Mr Chandler, the company’s managing director, had requested statements from National Australia Bank after discovering he was being paid less than his general manager.

Mr Beeck admitted that he requested the statements be sent to his email address in a move he described as an error of judgment. “I have never done it before and I have never done it again,” he said under cross examination last week.

The investigation into the salary discrepancies and the intrigue over the email diversions were not central to the allegations that Mr Beeck stole $676,279 as a servant of Bali Ha’i Cruises from March 2018 to July 2022.

But the investigation led to the breakdown to the 27-year working relationship between Mr Chandler and Mr Beeck.

They worked together in the two-person Subiaco headquarters of Bali Ha’i until the financial blow-up in July 2022.

They were close, and just how close could be central to the decision to be made by Magistrate Greg Penn about the guilt or innocence of Mr Beeck on 114 counts of stealing as a servant.

Mr Beeck claimed that the alleged payments were structured so that the other Bali Ha’i Cruises directors did not know about them.

Mr Beeck also claims Mr Chandler knew all about more than $670,000 of transfers to the general manager’s credit card and bank accounts between March 2018 and July 2022.

His defence is he had an honest belief he was entitled to the money and he lacked fraudulent inent.

The transfers were made from a Bali Ha’i Cruises everyday account that had received deposits from two other companies in the group, including the National Australia Bank account of the Indonesian operating company, Bali Hai Nusantara.

Mr Chandler has testified he knew little about modern banking technology and all payments from Bali Ha’i Cruises’ bank accounts were made by Mr Beeck,

Giving evidence last week, Mr Chandler said Mr Beeck was among the Bali Ha’i Cruises board members who agreed in March 2020 to cut their pay by 50 per cent so the company could survive the COVID downturn.

But Mr Chandler realised something was wrong when he saw a National Australia Bank account in July 2022 showing that Mr Beeck was being paid more than him.

Mr Chandler said he realised Mr Beeck had increased his pay to around 80 per cent of his regular salary. 

When he asked Mr Beeck why he had increased his salary, Mr Chandler claimed the general manager said: “Because I could.”

Mr Beeck testified he would never make such a comment.

He denied he was prevented by board rules from increasing his salary from the 50 per cent cut agreed in March 2020.

In her summing up, Ms Norton claimed that the 50 per cent wage cut was essential for the company’s survival .

She said Mr Beeck’s increasing his salary to 80 per cent of the original figure “behind the company’s back was petulant and arrogant”.

The prosecution tried to attack the credibility of Mr Beeck in its summing up, but the accused man’s lawyer Luca Margaretic said there were clear deficiencies in the police investigation.

Mr Margaretic said police had not independently analysed the two laptops used by Mr Beeck or attempted to reconstruct records from metadata. Instead they had relied on information provided by Bali Ha’i Cruises.

He said there was no effort to identify who had sent the money from the two accounts that were the sources of the money used for the allegedly fraudulent transfers. “Someone had to press send … it’s no small amount of money that was sent from Indonesia,” the defence barrister said.

Mr Chandler had testified he did know how to access the company’s electronic banking system, but Mr Margaretic said it was incongruous that the managing director would be so aloof from his own company’s finances.

Magistrate Penn adjourned his decision to November 20.