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In preparation for the case due to start in July, the film-makers were mostly successful when they asked for DeMarco’s counter claims and some intended defences to be ruled out. At DeMarco’s criminal trial he was found to have jacked up the prices of three planes made at the film-makers’ Vintage Aviator company, using his own company as a middleman in the sales so that his company pocketed the difference between the Vintage Aviator’s prices and the $2.1m the buyers paid. One of the planes was delivered to an Auckland charity, New Zealand Warbirds Association, and the money paid for the other two planes was eventually returned to the buyers.
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Sir Peter Jackson’s passion for vintage aircraft kept Eugene DeMarco busy for many years. (File photo)
The vintage plane company of movie moguls Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh is still trying to recover nearly $1 million from a former senior employee jailed for fraud. But former production manager for the Vintage Aviator Ltd, Eugene DeMarco, has made his own multi-million dollar counter-claim against the company, and other parties. In preparation for a hearing at the High Court in Wellington in July the company and other parties including Sir Peter Jackson and Dame Fran Walsh as trustees of the Film Property Trust, asked for DeMarco’s counterclaim to be struck out, and a court ruling that DeMarco has no defence to parts of their claim.
AVweb
Pilot Eugene DeMarco, who received a two-year-and-five-month prison sentence for crimes including the theft of several aircraft owned by filmmakers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, was released on parole late last fall after serving less than a year. DeMarco, a U.S. citizen living in New Zealand, was convicted of six counts of fraud in New Zealand’s Wellington High Court in September 2019. He was previously employed as general manager and chief pilot at Jackson’s and Walsh’s aircraft restoration and manufacturing company, The Vintage Aviator Limited (TVAL), which specialized in building replica World War I aircraft, engines and propellers.