£3,700 Fines in Bribery Case
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A SERIES of charges arising from rThbribes accepted by the transport manager of a large Birmingham office furniture firm resulted in fines and costs totalling £3,700 being imposed on four men and a road haulage company at Birmingham Assizes last Friday.
William George Gee, former transport manager of Constructors, Ltd., Erdington, Birmingham, pleaded guilty to four charges of corruptly accepting money gifts as a reward to show favour and one charge of attempting to obtain a corrupt reward.
Alfred Betts, company secretary, Ernest Clarke, company director, and their firm, Clarke and Co. (Sutton Coldfield), Ltd., of Gate Lane, Sutton Coldfield, each pleaded guilty to two charges of corruptly giving money gifts to Gee as a reward to show favour.
Douglas Ernest Mucklow, director of S. Linney and Son, haulage contractors, of Baker Street, Sparkhill, Birmingham, pleaded guilty to one charge of corruptly giving Gee a £20 gift as a reward to show favour.
Gee was fined a total of £1,500 and allowed six months to pay with an alternative of 12 months' imprisonment. Clarke was fined £500 or six months' imprisonment with six months to pay. Clarke and Co. were fined a total of 11,000 and ordered to pay a sum not exceeding 1500 towards the prosecution costs. Betts was fined £50 or one month's Imprisonment with three months to pay, and Mucklow was fined £150 or six weeks' imprisonment and allowed three months to pay.
Mr. B. Escott Cox, prosecuting, said Constructors, Ltd., contracted out to road
'haulage firms for long-distance transport work and Gee had been their transoort manager since 1942. His job was to select the contracts best suited to his employers.
Clarke and Co. were the main contractors and other contracting firms were Linney and Son, of which Mucklow was a director, and Arthur Turnbull and Sons, Ltd.
Since 1952 these three firms between them had done haulage work for Constructors amounting to £65,356. A practice had unfortunately grown up for these companies to give bribes to Gee which went under the name of "commission."
The money Gee received represented 2-1% of the total turnover of work given to each company, said Mr. Cox.
STRIKE THREAT INDIGNATION at being refused a day 1 off in addition to time-and-a-half for working on December 27 may lead to an unofficial one-day stoppage by 100,000 provincial bus employees. The men's claim has been met by the municipal undertakings.
Strike action on the dispute has not been recommended by the union side and it is thought that if some garages pressed for a token strike the response throughout the country would, at best, be patchy.
CHLORIDE CHANGES
achieve closer liaison between their technical, production and sales departments, Chloride Batteries, Ltd., are transferring the major portion of their sales headquarters from London to the head office and principal manufacturing centre of the company at Exide Works, Clifton Junction, air. Manchester, on January 2.