David Simon Barton appears to have used his time in prison writing lawsuits against his gaolers. Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
Fraudster and tax dodger David Simon Barton spent the last years of his life in prison, filing legal claims totalling $16.7 million against people in the justice system whom he felt had wronged him.
The courts knocked him back repeatedly, declaring his pleadings "vexatious and frivolous", but when he died last year a final bid to be heard on his multimillion-dollar claims was still live in the Court of Appeal.
Now the final legal action has failed for a man who fleeced old people of their life savings, squandered large amounts of other people's cash on gambling, and for 10 years withheld paying his dues to the Inland Revenue.
The Court of Appeal, after waiting for any of Barton's "personal representatives" to step forward and advance his case, has now struck out his last lawsuit.
Baron was aged 64 when he died and his dodgy dealings began at least 30 years earlier.
In the 1990s he ran his own mortgage-broking business, apparently managing some satisfied clients but also swindling multiple investors of their savings.
In 2000, he was sent to prison for four years for 81 dishonesty offences.
The amount he fleeced was a matter of disagreement - his defence lawyer conceded it was $1m but the prosecution put the figure at closer to $2.3m.
A lot of the money fed Barton's gambling habit.
The Auckland District Court was told that he lost $600,000 on horse racing and at SkyCity Casino.
On his release from prison in the early 2000s, Barton went back to describing himself as a mortgage broker even though it appears he was never licensed. His name cannot be found on the Financial Services Providers Register, which records both current and former registered brokers.
Barton was convicted of another six dishonesty offences in 2004 and 2005, adding to a criminal record that eventually ran to 15 pages.
By 2008, Barton had stopped paying income tax. He avoided doing so for the next decade, until Inland Revenue conducted an audit and found he had missed $400,000 of payments.
Barton was charged with 10 counts of evading tax - one for each year he failed to provide a return.
David Barton was jailed for three years and two months for evading tax by not filing returns to Inland Revenue for 10 years. Photo: NZME
"Taxpayers can't just choose to remove themselves from the tax system," an Inland Revenue spokesman, Tony Morris, said at the time.
"Barton was fully aware of his tax obligations. We made several attempts to try to help him get back on track but he simply wasn't interested in doing the right thing."
Barton was sentenced to three years and two months in jail but did not go to prison immediately. He applied for bail pending an appeal, was denied, and then successfully appealed the refusal of bail.
The appeal against his sentence eventually failed in December 2019 and he was told to surrender himself to begin his jail time, even though by then he had paid $165,000 of the tax owing.
Barton seems to have used his time in prison writing legal bids to have aspects of his case overturned, including a hopeless writ of habeas corpus, arguing he had been imprisoned illegally.
He even attempted to obtain release "in the interests of justice" due to the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. Again, the courts refused.
In all, court records show that Barton filed at least 16 actions in the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court after his 2017 convictions.
When he complained he was not being given facilities to prepare his cases, prison authorities gave him access to a computer and printer for several hours over three days a week. He used these to file claims against his gaolers.
In October 2020, Barton began a series of actions against the chief executive of the Department of Corrections, the police, the Parole Board and a number of named Corrections officers - 20 parties in total.
For being locked down in his cell for 23 hours a day, he claimed $175,000, plus exemplary damages of $100,000 against a named Corrections employee.
Challenging notes made for a review of his security rating, he claimed a total of $1.85m in damages. For the seizure of personal items, he claimed a total of $1.52m. For not being allowed to pursue self-employment, he alleged losses of $1.4m.
In all, the claims added up to $16.72m, according to a tally made in his final Court of Appeal action. He also sought apologies and demanded that certain people be sacked.
In the words of High Court Justice Geoffrey Venning: "The unsustainable amount of damages and other relief claimed by Mr Barton are vexatious and frivolous. They cannot be sustained and should not have been pursued."
Despite that, a final appeal against Justice Venning's stay of his proceedings - or rather, an application for an extension of time to appeal against the denial of a recall of Justice Venning's decision, such was Barton's persistence - was still live in the Court of Appeal when he died in May 2022.
He had previously expressed concern about obtaining timely treatment for an undisclosed medical condition.
Following his death, the Court of Appeal issued a minute asking if any personal representatives wished to progress his final action posthumously. No one came forward.
The Court of Appeal struck out the final case of David Simon Barton (Deceased) on June 15.
This story was originally published by the New Zealand Herald.