CHH struggles to extract scanned Kinleith invoices

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Invoices for $2.2 million deemed 'irretrievable' in co-generation lawsuit

By Rob O'Neill | Auckland | Friday, 23 October, 2009

Forest products company Carter Holt Harvey is strugging to retrieve invoice evidence in a lawsuit it is pursuing against firms that built a co-generation plant at its Kinleith mill site.

Carter Holt Harvey (CHH) has been pursuing the case against Genesis Energy and Rolls Royce since 2002. CHH claims the plant is flawed and does not meet specifications on a series of grounds including availability and capacity.

But CHH has been struggling to produce invoices to quantify its claims, according to an evidentiary judgment (pdf) from the Auckland High Court.

The judgment says that when he gave evidence in June, CHH's financial controller Sven Tribbe noted that invoices supporting $11,473,083 in respect of its remediation claim had been extracted from the company's SAP system.

It was also his evidence that some invoices were 'irretrievable' due to a change in the way they were scanned.

Before November 2004, CHH used Datacap for scanning of supplier invoices and for electronic storage of those invoices, the company explained to the court in April. Then CHH changed suppliers, appointing Datamail.

"As part of this transfer CHH received copies from Datacap of the electronic invoices stored on Datacap’s system. However, it has since been determined that the records received from Datacap were incomplete and a number of invoices, including some relevant to this brief, are missing," CHH explained.

"Despite significant correspondence with Datacap we have been unable to resolve this issue."

Datacap has since been acquired by Australian company Speedscan.

Invoices that could not be extracted, totalling $2.2 million, were dubbed 'irretrievable' in the case. CHH then tried to recover these from third party suppliers and succeeded, with $1,350,627.30 worth of documents. That leaves the total value of irretrievable invoices in the case at $878,073, for now at least.