Conspiracy in Licensing Denied
Page 33
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DLEADING not guilty, Joseph Keel
ing, garage proprietor, of Viaduct Garage, Kirkstall Road, Leeds, and Thomas Whitehead, haulage contractor, formerly in business at Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, appeared at Leeds Assizes, this week, before Mr. Justice Macnaghten and a jury.
Keeling was charged with allowing the use, with intent to deceive, of an identity certificate on a motor vehicle, with making false statements to obtain the grant of A licences, and making false statements to obtain the variation of A licences. Charges of making false statements to obtain an A licence and to secure a variation were preferred against Whitehead. In addition, the two men were charged with conspiring with one another to obtain the grant and variation of an A licence.
The case for the prosecution was that, in order to secure an A licence, Heeling pretended to obtain the variation of the licence of another man, who had retired from business, to one of his own vehicles, in the name of the retired
contractor. He then had it again varied, still in the same name, to the vehicle which be had sold to a customer. In a second series of charges, said the prosecution, Keeling had the services of Whitehead.
Mr. H. R. B. Shepherd, for Keeling, suggested that the evidence of two persons with whom Keeling had had dealings was as vague and unsatisfactory as it could be. Keeling's defence was that these two persons gave hbri carte blanche in the handling of their businesses and he was doing his best to translate into cash whatever assets they possessed through the undertakings which he carried on for them. His defence to the charges of false statements was that they were not false, but true.
On the allegations concerning Whitehead, there WM the additional defence that, although they dealt with August 4 and September 0, 1936, Keeling and Whitehead completely severed their connection, at least two months previously, in May of that year.