The Gazette 1972

How they "cooked" the Navy's Books The "Navy case"—"a blatant and downright fraud on the public," as Mr. Justice Bridge described it yesterday —was simplicity itself. And it was turned into some- thing approaching a fine art by Andrew Cathcart, a pro- duct of the Glasgow slums who was drafted into the Navy in 1946, shot up to the rank of lieutenant within 15 years, and who was gaoled for four years at Win- chester yesterday. came in. Gathcart simply destroyed them and typed out new ones. (A careful man, he realised after filing the fake invoices away that if they had come in the post— as they were supposed to have done—they would be folded. His fake invoices had no fold. So he took them out of his files, carefully folded each one in the right places, and then replaced them.)

Supply officers would then sign cheques for the amounts shown on the invoices—and, indeed, roughly half of the money was in fact spent on food for the ship or establishment concerned. But the rest was split between the catering officer (usually, 80 per cent) and the wholesaler. The catering officers—by this time, the fraud had "spread like wildfire", as the court was to be told— needed the bigger share; they had their overheads to take into account. At Collingwood, for instance, Cath- cart had a group of petty officers and chief petty officers working under him. And he had to also pay a "good housekeeping" bonus to his cooks. (The Navy did not keep delivery records, so there wa no way of checking the discrepancy between the price on the invoice and what was actually delivered.) As business boomed, Cathcart expanded. His monthly take-home cut (his Naval salary was just over £3,000) enabled the former Glasgow kitchen boy to buy four cars, expensive hi-fi and stereo equipment, a large house in the trendiest suburbs of Plymouth and costly photographic equipment. According to Sub-Lieutenant Barrington Blogg, who replaced Cathcart at HMS Collingwood when the latter was posted to Plymouth, the fraud was bringing in £2,500 a month when he—Blogg—took over. The fraud was finally exposed on December 3rd last year when a new officer replaced Blogg. He was told by the men in the section about what was going on, and he promptly reported it to senior officers. The word reached the Ministry of Defence, and at that point Portsmouth police were called in. For five weeks, a squad of detectives "did their home- work", keeping their work under the tightest of wraps. One whisper would have led, almost certainly, to the destruction of vital documentary evidence. On January 4th, the police learned that Collingwood's new catering officer was due to receive a payout from Frederick Wain. He agreed to become the bait, driving under surveil- lance to Wain's warehouse in Middle Street, Ports- mouth, where he was given a cheque for £766. Then the raids started in earnest; offices and ware- houses were visited, as were the homes of navy men, and thousands of bills, invoices and receipts seized linking the fraud to bases and depots throughout Britain. —Guardian, 15th November 1972

Official reports fairly glowed with admiration of the "zealous" and "hard-working" Scot who was rapidly rising through the ranks of the Navy's catering branch. Gathcart was superefficient. He had to be. If he had been anything less he would have been unable to build up a surplus so big that the Navy could not detect the frauds to follow. To this day, no-one knows just how big the fraud was, or for how long it had been going on. But Mr. Justice Bridge said yesterday that the trial, had revealed a "horrifying picture of catering departments and naval establishments which for long years, it seems, have been riddled with corruption and dishonesty." The swindle centred around fake invoices and worked in one of three ways. Supplies either sent invoices for goods that were not delivered, or they listed inflated prices on the invoices. The third twist involved catering officers destroying correct invoices and making out new ones listing ficticious items. This jacked the bill up to something approaching the per capita cater- ing allowance. There is still no precise information on where or when the fraud began, although it more than probably grew out of the "backhander" system—cash payments of around five per cent of the total value of orders placed—given to caterers by their suppliers. The back- hander system did not directly affect the process of goods bought by Navy establishments. It is thought that the backhander system has been in operation for at least 25 years, and probably a lot longer. In some cases, the sums involved amounted to about £1,500 a year. (The Navy spends £1.7 millions a year with private food merchants. The yearly cater- ing bill for a frigate is about £10,000.) What is known is that Lieutenant Cathcart began operating some time in 1968, when he was catering officer to Britain's largest naval shore establishment, HMS Collingwood, between Portsmouth and Southampton. And when Cathcart came to trial a few weeks ago, amost every one of his co-defendants from Colling- wood and, later, HMS Raleigh, claimed that the grey- ing, be-spectacled and slightly-built Scot had started them on the road to arrest and charges of conspiracy and deception. Cathcart quickly got into his stride, printing stacks of blank invoices bearing the letterhead of Frederick Wain Ltd., a Portsmouth food supplier who was gaoled for two years yesterday. When the genuine invoices

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