The Crown closed its case yesterday in the Supreme Court trial of a man accused of conspiring to assist his father's fraudulent Bermuda status application.

Robert William Martyn, 42, of Harrington Sound Road in Smith's, is accused of conspiring with his father, William Robert Martyn, to defraud the Minister of Home Affairs and Labour by submitting false documents as part of his father's status application in September, 2000 ? and thereby assisting his own.

Investigating officer Det. Con. Ann Phillips described to the court her dealings with the matter after she was assigned to the case by her boss Det. Insp. Eddie Davies in 2001.

Without going into the specifics of the investigation or the Police's conclusions, Det. Con. Phillips described her interaction both with the Chief Immigration Officer Martin Brewer and a representative from the Registrar General's office in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where certified copies of the relevant documents for the Martyn family, including birth, marriage and death certificates were stored.

Det. Con. Phillips said under questioning from Crown counsel Paula Tyndale that Police had had some concern over Mr. Martyn's birth certificate submitted as part of his own Bermuda status application.

The concern was first raised after Police compared this copy of his birth certificate with the original sent from the Registrar General in Ontario where he was born, given that the former document was missing its date of issue ? a bizarre omission.

But when cross-examined by defence counsel Saul Froomkin, Det. Con. Phillips admitted the two birth certificates were identical in every other way and that the information contained on them was accurate to the best of her knowledge.

The defence was attempting to show that the absence of an issue date on the birth certificate submitted with the defendant's status application was merely an administrative error and that otherwise the certificate was bona fide.

Indeed, the Crown has never been seeking to claim that the defendant's status application was fraudulent.

Instead, they have maintained throughout the complicated proceedings that both the father and son conspired to:

Alter the birth place of the defendant's grandfather, a William Walter Martyn, on the grandparents' marriage certificate from England to Bermuda. This initial Bermuda link would then serve as a basis for the father's status application and, by extension, the defendant's.

Alter the birthplace of the grandfather on the father's birth certificate, submitted as part of the father's status application, from England to Bermuda for the same purpose.

The Crown maintains that the grandfather was born in England and not Bermuda ? a fact which would have fatally undermined both the father and the son's claims to status.

As evidence of this, the Crown called upon a representative from the British High Commission in Ottawa, who testified last week that the father had successfully applied for British citizenship in November, 1992 on the basis that his father ? the defendant's grandfather ? was born in England.

The case hinges on whether the Crown has proven that the son knew the documents he helped submit as part of his father's status application were false.

The defence has attempted to show from day one that the defendant had no way of knowing that the marriage certificate and the birth certificate included in his father's status application were fake and that he had acted in good faith.

The trial continues this morning in front of Puisne Judge Carlisle Greaves.