R v Rance
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE |
| Judgment Date | 26 November 1975 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1975] EWCA Crim J1126-1 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Docket Number | No. 3322/R/75 |
| Date | 26 November 1975 |
[1975] EWCA Crim J1126-1
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
The Lord Chief Justice of England (Lord Widgery)
Lord Justice James
and
Lord Justice Shaw
No. 3322/R/75
No. 5243/R/75
MR. W. STEER, Q.C. and MR. I. PAYNE appeared on behalf of the Applicant Rance.
THE APPLICANT HERRON did not appear and was not represented.
MR. P. TAYLOR, Q.C. and MR. F.J. MULLER appeared on behalf of the Crown.
This application is a sequel to the case last before this Court yesterday in that both concerned the Applicant Rance and both were concerned with allegations of corruption in the building industry. The case before the Court yesterday had been tried in May of 1975, and in June of 1975 again at Newcastle Crown Court, but before a different Judge, the Applicant Rance and Herron were charged on an indictment containing two counts as follows. Count 1 charged Rance with corruptly procuring the payment of £600 to one Herron, a Labour Councillor on Whickham Urban District Council, in May 1968, and count 2 charged Herron with corrupt receipt of that self-same amount.
The circumstances in which the parties came together were these. The Applicant Rance was the managing director of a building company called Carlton Contractors Limited, a company which had its main headquarters in the South of England but also was conducting operations in the North through a body of manage-ment up there.
At the Northern Division in particular was a man called Byrne, who was the public relations officer. The case for the Crown was that the company, with the knowledge and acquiescence of Ranee, and acting through Byrne, had paid out bribes, and in particular had paid this bribe of £600 to Herron.
The evidence in support of this particular bribe was primarily the evidence of Byrne, who said in the frankest and widest terms that he had the authority of the company, and in particular Mr. Rance, to indulge in the pursuit of all acts of bribery in the North of England, and that he had in fact told Herron that if the company got a particular tender in which the Whickham Council was interested, he would see that Herron got £600. He went on in his evidence to say that that was the explanation of the sum of £600 so paid.
There was no doubt whatever that a cheque for £600 drawn on the company's account was given to Herron. It seems quite clear that Rance signed the cheque, though that might have been, I suppose, for conformity if other circumstances had pointed to his innocence. But the justification in the company's accounts for this figure of £600 is supplied in quite a different way. The company had a system of obtaining certificates in respect of work done by sub-contractors, the completion of which certificates was a condition precedent to the payment of the sub-contractors' bills. This £600 was backed, as it were, in the company's accounts with a bogus certificate naming Herron as a sub-contractor and certifying that he was entitled to £600 as such. He obviously was not entitled to anything of the kind. The certificate purporting to authorise his receipt of that sum was signed by Rance.
It was a very unusual thing for Rance to sign such a certificate, particularly in the North of England, because the person who signs such a certificate would normally be indicating from his own knowledge the correctness of the payment. One would have thought if there was one person who could not con-ceivably know whether a sub-contractor's claim was a genuine one or not it was the managing director, normally operating some 300 or 400 miles away. However that is what happened, and it was on that basis that the money was paid out.
The defence of Rance, when tackled with the plain fact that this sum was unjustified and had been paid on his signature, both on the cheque and on the sub-contractor's certificates, was that he must have been tricked, that he must have been persuaded to sign the document not knowing what it was, and that it was for that reason and that reason only that he seemed to be implicated in what was undoubtedly a transaction for bribery.
That is enough of the background to this case to illustrate the points which have been brought out in the course of the argument. The first and most important issue which this application has raised is the admissibility in the trial below of certain "similar fact" evidence concerning two other alleged bribes in which Rance was implicated. One of these two other cases is the case of Rance and McKenna, which this Court dealt with yesterday. It set aside the convictions on grounds which are not relevant in the present case. The admissibility of the similar facts therefore comes to this appeal for decision for the first time.
Those who were in Court yesterday, and who have knowledge of the McKenna case, will remember that in that case the association of Rance with the payment of a bribe to McKenna was again two certificates in respect of sub-contractors' work. The sum was £800. The contact between Rance and the person to be bribed was closer in that case because the money was said to have been paid over in a brown paper parcel at Rance's London club. The mechanism of obtaining the money was the same; the same use was made of the bogus sub-contractor's certificate, and Rance's defence in the McKenna case was that he knew that he was paying over £800 but did not realise that it was a corrupt payment in respect of future benefits, and rather thought it was a genuine and merited payment for past work done by McKenna –- a somewhat different explanation, as can be seen.
The other case which was put forward for consideration as a case involving similar fact evidence was a case concerning a Councillor Bowes. Councillor Bowes received £1,000 in two instalments of £500. There can be no doubt now that on the face of it at all events that was a corrupt transaction and again Rance was implicated in it, because on one of the exhibits one finds what was clearly a bogus bill submitted by Bowes with a note at the bottom in Rance's handwriting saying that the money was to be paid and to be charged to the Doncaster contract, although Bowes himself had been at some pains to tailor his claim in such a way that it did not refer to the Doncaster contract at all.
The question whether evidence of those two other cases should be admitted had to depend on the recent conclusions of the House of Lords in the case of Boardman (1975) Appeal Cases 421. There are two very helpful passages which indicate a crisp, modern test to decide the vexed and oft-argued question of how far evidence of similar criminal transactions can be admitted.
I take first a passage from Lord Cross's speech at page 457. He says: "As Viscount Simon said in Harris v. Director of Public Prosecutions (1952) A.C. 694, 705, it is not possible to compile an exhaustive list of the sort of cases in which 'similar fact' evidence – to use a compendious phrase – is admissible. The question must always be whether the similar fact evidence taken together with the other evidence would do no more than raise or strengthen a suspicion that the accused committed the offence with which he is charged or would point so strongly to his guilt that only an ultra-cautious jury, if they accepted it as true, would acquit in face of it. In the end -although the admissibility of such evidence is a question of law, not of discretion – the question as I see it must be one of degree."
Then later Lord Salmon, dealing with the same point, uses these words at page 462. He said: "My Lords, whether or not evidence is relevant and...
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