VAR boss and council's IT head official cleared of fraud

Pair's trial branded a 'highly unfortunate waste of public funds'

A reseller boss and the head of IT at a south Welsh council have been cleared of fraud in a trial which a defending barrister said should never have been brought to the court, according to local press reports.

Camelot IT's managing director Gary Inchliffe and Torfaen Council's head of IT Farooq Dastgir – who had been suspended on full pay since 2011 – were found not guilty of false accounting at the end of the three-week trial.

The duo had been accused of working together to use £10,000 of public money to fund an advert for its Shared Resource Service datacentre in local newspaper the South Wales Argus despite it having been agreed the pull-out would be privately funded.

Dastgir was accused of creating an invoice to Camelot IT for £10,000 worth of cabling work which had not been – nor ever would be – completed so that the reseller could then fund the supplement with the cash.

The defence insisted the invoice was legitimate and that the work detailed would have been carried out in the future.

According to the Free Press Series which attended the trial, the jury took less than three hours to return a not-guilty verdict. Judge Rhys Rowlands directed jurors to return not guilty verdicts for two of the charges – false accounting and misconduct in public office – facing Dastgir.

Dastgir said the two-year trial had come at a high price for him.

"I hope that everything goes OK now. The thing that really hurt me was that nobody spoke to me. I was just sent out – outcast. I would have loved anybody to speak to me for five minutes," he said, the Free Press Series reported.

"The last two and a half years have been a great strain for me and my family, whose love and support has kept me strong."

Dastgir will now face an internal disciplinary hearing within the council but he said he hopes to return to his role at the authority – where he has worked for 28 years – in the near future.

Inchliffe said he is looking forward to getting back to business soon.

"I'm just so relieved that my wife and I and the company can now put all this behind us and concentrate on the business again," he said. "It has been an extremely difficult two and a half years and caused both physical and emotional strain. I am so grateful to all those who believed and supported me throughout this period."

Mr Inchliffe's barrister Adrian Maxwell branded the trial a waste of time.

"This investigation and trial was a highly unfortunate waste of public funds ending in a three-week trial of two men, two hard-working men, who were servants of their community," he said.

"It should never have been brought before the criminal justice system. There may have been errors made by each party in this case but they were never matters that should have been subject to the criminal justice system."