The Serious Fraud Office is a serious fraud.

The SFO fails all standards expected of a Government Agency.

It is failing at its mandated role, identifying and successfully prosecuting serious fraud.

It is competing with the Police for small fry - why were the Huata's SFO cases. The action was for $82,000 I think. The total was less than $1million. Is it because the PM has a greater oversight of its cases than the Police?

At the time (The White Report - December 2004) it seemed the 'clearance' of John Tamihere of serious accusations was fortunate. Is there a political element to the offices workings.

The SFO is proving to be incompetent, venal and mean-spirited - perhaps the more serious accusations one can lay at the foot of a Government agency. Corruption would be the worse accusation and thankfully there is no evidence of that yet.

There has to be complete and full accountability demonstrated for the clearly ill advised prosecution of the Helicopter Trust people. By all accounts the case had no legs. This prosecution appears to be mean-spirited in the extreme.

How could they have spent so long bringing the case and spent so much for it to end so quickly and so ignominously following final arguments. This is rank incompetence and a squandering of taxpayer funding. The accused were not rich men able to spin and drag out proceedings - they were ordinary New Zealander's trying eke out a living - particularly those two on the charity side who faced no accusations of personal gain. Having just about fucked the resuce helicopter service in Auckland the SFO minions and head would not want to find themselves needy of the service's services