Two IT contractors have been sentenced to three years in jail, in New Zealand’s largest corruption case involving a publicly listed company.<\/p>\n
Australian citizens Sean Bryan and Mark Lester pleaded guilty last year to paying and receiving more than $4 million in kickbacks while contracting for Spark New Zealand.<\/p>\n
The charges were first filed by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in April 2023 and the pair were sentenced in the High Court in Auckland today.<\/p>\n
In 2013, Lester was contracted by Spark to oversee testing associated with a major upgrade to it’s customer services IT platform and over time was given more responsibility and promoted into a senior technology role.<\/p>\n
Lester recommended to Spark that they use Bryan’s company, Victory IT, to assist with testing upgrades to the IT platform.<\/p>\n
Despite Lester and Bryan knowing each other outside of their work, their relationship was never disclosed.<\/p>\n
Based on Lester’s recommendations, Victory IT continued to receive contracts and was paid about $20.7 million between March 2014 and June 2017.<\/p>\n
Between June 2014 to May 2017, Bryan made 32 payments totalling approximately $4.1 million from his company (Victory IT) to Lester.<\/p>\n
The individual payments had no commercial basis and ranged in value from $10,500 to $379,500 and were made in return for Lester promoting Bryan’s interests.<\/p>\n
SFO director Karen Chang said it was New Zealand’s largest ever private sector corruption case involving a publicly listed company.<\/p>\n
“It sends a clear warning about the real risks corruption poses. These risks include, harming the integrity of our business environment, reducing competition and lowering investor confidence.<\/p>\n
“While this particular case does not involve foreign bribery, it highlights the behaviours the SFO’s latest campaign is targeting and reinforces why we must protect New Zealand’s reputation as a safe, trusted place to do business.<\/p>\n
“We rely on people and corporates coming forward and speaking up when they see wrongdoing, it’s a crucial part of how we uncover and address serious fraud and corruption in New Zealand. Our message is simple, if you see something report it,” she said.<\/p>\n
Spark has pursued a civil case against Lester and Bryan to have the money repaid.<\/p>\n
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Two IT contractors have been sentenced to three years in jail, in New Zealand’s largest corruption case involving a publicly listed company. Australian citizens Sean Bryan and Mark Lester pleaded guilty last year to paying and receiving more than $4 million in kickbacks while contracting for Spark New Zealand. The charges were first filed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":13666,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13665"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13667,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13665\/revisions\/13667"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}