Alan Charles Rowland was deported from Cayman to his native England on 8 September after a jury trial in which he was found guilty and a trial by judge alone in which he was found not guilty.
Rowland, 55, faced charges of obtaining property by deception based on incidents in 2004. He maintained that he wanted to work and pay people back, but work permit applications put in for him were not approved.
Rowland’s first trial was in February when a jury found that he had presented 16 cheques as valid orders for payment although he knew they would not be honoured.
The cheques were made out to various merchants for sums ranging from $163 to $1,138. Rowland admitted signing the cheques, but said he did not fill them out or present them.
After the jury’s verdicts, Justice Alex Henderson imposed a sentence of nine months probation with conditions including house arrest.
This month, Rowland went to trial on two separate charges of obtaining property by deception: $10,000 from one man and $2,000 from another as loans on the basis that the money would be used to purchase a vehicle for quick resale at a profit.
Acting Justice Nigel Meeson conducted the trial and found Rowland not guilty. ‘I have no doubt most people would consider what he did was naïve and extremely stupid, but the question has to be whether he was dishonest.’
The judge said he was left in doubt because Rowland appeared to have intended to pay the money back and thought he had the means of doing so.
That was on Wednesday, 5 September. Two days later, Senior Crown Counsel Gail Johnson applied to have Rowland deported. She told Justice Henderson that Rowland was destitute. The person with whom he had been living had left the island and the landlady had evicted him. Rowland had no alternate address for his house arrest sentence.
He had completed six months of the nine-month sentence.
The judge varied his probation order, lifted the house arrest condition for the remaining three months and recommended immediate deportation.
The Governor’s office was able to provide a temporary emergency passport and Immigration sent Rowland back to the UK aboard a flight on Saturday, 8 September. Officials were able to use money from the repatriation fund and deposit Rowland had paid on starting his company, Fleet Services.
Ms Johnson said the Crown opted for this approach rather than add to the strain on resources at Northward Prison for three months and then still have to deport the man.
Rowland’s problems apparently began in September 2003 when he met a man who said he had connections with a major company in Cayman.
The man, referred to as D in this report, was said to be out of the jurisdiction now.
Rowland gave evidence in court that D told him he could get $1.5 million from the company he was connected with. He pursued this because he wanted to expand his vehicle repair business.
Then D told him the company owner wanted to assist Caymanians, so Rowland should apply for status and D would help him because he had connections. Rowland gave him money and his passport, but when status grants were announced he was not a recipient.
D also told Rowland he had to show the company owner that he was investing in his own business, so Rowland came up with $45,000, which he gave to D.
By February 2004, Rowland was asking about the money. D told him the $1.5 million had been taken to Honduras to buy drugs for shipment to Miami. Five million dollars would come back to Cayman from Miami.
By this time Rowland believed his life was being threatened. He did not go to police because he had been given the names of high-ranking people said to be involved in the scheme.
Rowland said he was then told the boxes of money had arrived, but D needed to ‘grease some palms’ to get the boxes off the dock, so he needed to raise money quickly.
Rowland said all he wanted was his $45,000 so that he could pay people back. D told him he needed a final $40,000 to pay off certain officers.
Rowland said that was when he signed blank cheques, which D told him would be held as security by friends who would provide cash to make up the $40,000. (These were the cheques that figured in the February trial.)
By this time, Rowland told the court, he was desperate, with no money to pay his staff or purchase parts for the business.
D suggested that Rowland sell his vehicle, valued at $27,000. Rowland later learned that the vehicle did not belong to D, but to his mother. Around 28 April 2004, Rowland obtained $10,000 from someone he knew and gave the money to D, but did not get a receipt. He was told he would get the keys and logbook for the vehicle the next day. But he didn’t.
Then he tried to find D, but couldn’t. Slowly he realised that he had been taken in, but he still thought he would get the vehicle to sell.
He accepted that he had obtained $2,000 from another acquaintance on 6 May 2004, but said it was all the same time frame and he was in such a mess.
Rowland said he intended to pay the money back when he was allowed to work, but his own company, Fleet Services, had been shut down and he could not get a work permit approved although other companies had wanted to hire him.
In closing speeches, Ms Johnson said the test for dishonesty was whether what Rowland did was dishonest by the ordinary standards of reasonable and honest people and whether Rowland realised what he was doing would be regarded as dishonest by those standards.
Defence Attorney Menelik Miller said Rowland was the victim of a con artist and never received any financial advantage. His state of mind was that he believed it was still possible to carry out the transaction with the vehicle, get access to money and eventually pay investors back.
The circumstances in which Rowland found himself might seem unbelievable, but the explanation went a long way to explain his state of mind.
In his judgment, Justice Meeson said there are four elements to the offence charged: deception, dishonesty, obtaining, and the intention to permanently deprive. The prosecution had to prove all four and he was left in doubt.
Related Videos
