Any reference to CASACIR or its directors, shareholders, owners or operators relates to pre-14 February 2024 when the company was sold. In no way can anything said relate to the company or its new owners, operators, directors, and shareholders after that sale.
I make no comment about the actual quality of rock that is produced and sold as rock from man X, man Y and CASACIR’s quarries, I merely point to the comments made as follows, by those who should and do know:
Kraan’s witness statement stated [emphasis mine]: “4.3 The lower class products produced from this quarry will be predominantly used for road construction and maintenance, rebuilding of road shoulders etc., hard standing pavement areas, private and domestic use for buildings and driveways, access tracks and roads for farms and forests, pipe bedding for drainage and culverts, and general use as a construction material for filling etc”.
In addition, man Y testified under oath in the Victorian Supreme Court that [emphasis mine]: “[Man X and I] originally started a company, we bought the Mount Speed quarry at Trafalgar and we floated a company which we owned between us and we called it Mount Speed Quarries. That operated for some years. We then had the opportunity to buy a concrete plant, two concrete plants, an asphalt plant and a quarry known as granite rock, and it was not practical to call the company then Mount Speed Quarries because it wasn’t just Mount Speed. My companies, Stabilime group, are and were major customers obviously of Casacir and the rock that we were producing or that [man X] on our behalf was producing out of Mount Speed was not the highest grade of stone. We weren’t buying necessarily VicRoads quality but it is a natural mudstone deposit and when you crush it, some parts of it tend to be softer than a basalt or a granite rock quarry and some of my engineers had some disputes with [man X] over the quality and it became known affectionately in our company as mount mud, purely internally, and we had to think of a name and I sat down one night and I certainly did come up with the acronym that is Casacir[1]”[2].
Southall, on behalf of man X and man Y, told the Victorian Supreme Court as absolute fact that: “It’s common ground amongst people in the industries in Gippsland that Casacir stands for the somewhat crude express, “crush any shit and call it rock“[3]
It is strange that they want to broadcast that the rock they sell is sometimes inferior, while other quarries try to tell you as best they can, that their own rock is quality (e.g. “Cootes quarry products – quality sand and crushed stone”, and “Gippsland Premium Quarries”). Why be proud of the fact that you sometimes dupe customers
[1] The acronym is Crush Any Shit And Call It Rock
[2] T246:20–T247:10 (12 April 2013)
[3] T98:28-31 (10 April 2013)