Trainer Robert Smerdon would have insulted top jockey Damien Oliver if he had asked him if money he passed to him from a mutual friend was the proceeds of a bet on a horse, a tribunal has heard.
Smerdon is appealing against his conviction for having brought racing into disrepute by giving Oliver $10,000 which turned out to be his winnings from a bet on the horse Miss Octopussy in a race at Moonee Valley in October, 2010.
“It would have been an insult for Mr Smerdon to suggest to Oliver that he’d had a bet,” Smerdon’s lawyer Patrick Wheelahan told the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT).
Oliver admitted last year he improperly placed the bet through Mark Hunter and was duly banned from racing for nine months.
But Smerdon maintains he had no idea why their mutual friend Hunter gave him the money and asked him to give it to the jockey and felt no need to ask questions about it.
At an earlier hearing the Racing Appeals and Disciplinary Board fined Smerdon $10,000 for having brought racing into disrepute by passing on the money without attempting to determine the circumstances.
Wheelahan told the tribunal Smerdon had every right to regard Oliver as an honourable person who had never bet on a horse in a race in which he was riding before the Miss Octopussy case, as Racing Victoria stewards had when they accepted his guilty plea in the matter.
At Oliver’s hearing his lawyer described the bet as a “one-off” and his former master and long-time friend Lee Freedman gave evidence he had never known the jockey to bet.
The evidence was accepted by the stewards.
“Mr Smerdon is entitled to hold the same view,” Wheelahan told the tribunal.
“He is not obliged to second guess a man of Oliver’s standing.”
Smerdon says he didn’t ask about the reason for Hunter wanting to give Oliver the money because it was “none of my business”.
He says he was merely doing a favour for a friend, that he had never counted the money and had passed it on to Oliver in private because “that is what I would do whoever it was”.
“I’d rather not know,” he said in evidence.
The hearing before Judge John Nixon is continuing.
