EXTENSIVE RAILWAY FRAUDS AT LYTTELTON.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1348, 2 June 1885, Page 2

EXTENSIVE RAILWAY FRAUDS AT LYTTELTON.

There has been discovered in Lyttelton a series of frauds of a singularly audacious description, which are alleged to have been made in the Railway Department. On Saturday morning nine men were charged at the Lyttelton B.M. Court with “ conspiring to defraud Her Majesty the Queen.*' The nature of the charge did not then appear, for Sergeant Mason asked the Magistrate to grant a remand till Wednesday, pending the arrival of one of the principal conspirators. Tiie remand was granted accordingly. The individual referred to by the Sergeant as a principal conspirator is Thomas Hough, a well-known timekeeper on the railway at Lyttelton. It appears (hat according to the system of working on the railway wharves and the Government sheds the men are supplied by the timekeeper with a ticket when they go to work in the morning. Their day’s woik done, they present the ticket to him, and he marks upon it the

number of hours during which they have been employed. It if now alleged that Hough abused the position of trust he enjoyed as timekeeper, and, with eight of the bands employed by the Department, entered into a deliberate conspiracy to defraud the Government by making it pay for work which was never done. The men are said to have come to him in the morning for tickets, and to have come to him in the evening to be marked, but the intermediate time was spent by them not in the Government sheds, but in the employ of private citizens. How long this is supposed to have been going on at present cannot be staled, but the sums of which her Majesty has thus been defrauded are estimated roughly at several hundred pounds. Of ceurse Hough is supposed to have afterwards shared in the ptunj der.

When the alleged discovery was made Hough was absent from Lyttelton, having gone over to the other silo. Lately, however, the police learned that he was leaving Sydney for Wellington, and Constable O’Connor was despatched to apprehend him on bis arrival at the latter port. This he succeeded in doing on Friday morning last, and simultaneously the Lyttelton police arrested the nine men already mentioned .—Press.