Hotel bill detainee acquitted of fraud

THE man who ran up an unpaid bill of close to half a million dollars during a ten-month stay at the Windhoek Country Club Hotel four years ago is blaming a crooked banker who is now sitting in an American jail for his failure to settle his debts to the hotel.

This defence of Jamaican national Norman Lockland Escoffery (69) won him an acquittal on a count of fraud and an alternative charge of theft by false pretences in the Windhoek Regional Court yesterday.Escoffery’s trial started before acting Regional Court Magistrate Johannes Shuuveni on Wednesday last week. After the prosecution closed its case this week Wednesday, Escoffery’s lawyer, Richard Metcalfe, also closed the case in Escoffery’s defence, without calling Escoffery to testify in his own defence.Metcalfe’s strategy paid off yesterday, when Magistrate Shuuveni found Escoffery not guilty after he had heard arguments from Metcalfe and Public Prosecutor Carol-Ann Esterhuizen.The only issue the court had to decide was whether Escoffery had made any misrepresentations to the hotel at any stage during his stay there, the Magistrate said. On the evidence placed before the court, he came to the conclusion that the prosecution did not even come close to proving that Escoffery had committed fraud, he said.In a plea explanation provided to the court last week, Escoffery admitted that he stayed at the hotel from April 28 2005 to March 1 2006 and ran up an account of N$472 922,92 in that time.The account was never settled.The blame for that must rest squarely on the shoulders of one Michael Wayne Heshelman, Escoffery claims.In his plea statement he claimed Heshelman was his ‘banker, investment and financial advisor’ and that Heshelman had given the hotel numerous promises and guarantees that Escoffery’s hotel bill would be paid.Except for one payment of 10 000 Swiss francs, equivalent to about N$49 715, that was in fact done in August 2005, none of the other promised payments ever materialised.Heshelman even travelled to Namibia, and also stayed in the hotel for a week, in February 2006 to personally assure the hotel that the account would be paid, the court heard from two senior managers of the hotel during the trial.Escoffery also claimed that he had invested some 660 000 Euro through Heshelman – only to find out last year that Heshelman had been arrested in the United States of America, where he was then convicted on various counts of fraud and money laundering. Heshelman was sentenced to a 17-year prison term last year for having run a multimillion-dollar pyramid investment scam, the court was told.The money he invested with Heshelman simply disappeared in that pyramid scheme, Escoffery claims.He stated in his plea explanation: ‘I have hence become a destitute, poor man where I was once a relatively wealthy man.’Escoffery had been the victim of ‘a cold, calculating, merciless fraudster’, Metcalfe charged in his arguments. It was Heshelman, and not Escoffery, who had made misrepresentations to the hotel, he argued.Because of the unpaid account, the hotel had Escoffery arrested on a civil warrant of arrest on March 2 2006. A gross abuse of the legal process and Escoffery’s rights then took place when he was left to languish in prison for the next year and eight months before he was released. He was then immediately arrested and charged in the case finalised yesterday, and remained in custody until he was released on bail in February last year.Escoffery sued the hotel over his detention without trial. That case, as well as the hotel’s claim against him over the unpaid bill, has since been settled with each side withdrawing its claim against the other.