Aussie bid to have Clive Palmer’s lawyer booted from international tribunal fails
Australia’s attempts to have a Swiss lawyer representing Clive Palmer booted from an international tribunal have fallen flat.
National
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The federal government has failed to remove a lawyer picked by Clive Palmer from an international tribunal that will determine a $41.3bn claim against Australia by the mining magnate.
Australia asked for Swiss lawyer and politician Charles Poncet to be turfed from the tribunal because an Italian court convicted him in 1996 of preparing false documents for a fraudster connected to a secret Masonic lodge and one of the country’s biggest banking scandals.
But because the conviction was later overturned on technical legal grounds, Australia’s bid to have Dr Poncet excluded from the tribunal was thrown out in September.
Dr Poncet was in November booted from a separate panel hearing an unrelated dispute involving a gas company and Iran over negative remarks he made on Swiss television about a woman wearing a “burkini” swimming costume at a sporting event.
Dr Poncet denies doing anything wrong in either case.
The Attorney-General’s Department declined to comment on the burkini ruling but said grounds to challenge arbitrators could differ between cases.
Dr Poncet’s panel will rule on what the department says is an “unsubstantiated” claim by Mr Palmer for compensation over a Queensland coal project that was denied approval.
It is one of three international arbitration fights Mr Palmer has picked with Australia, the biggest of which is a bid for $296bn over the WA state government’s decision to stop him getting compensation for an iron ore project it kiboshed.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said the government “will vigorously defend Australia’s interests” and work with WA and Queensland as it fights the claims.
Mr Palmer is also fighting the Federal Government in Australian courts, where he faces two separate sets of criminal charges over his Coolum resort and the funding of his Palmer United Party that have yet to come to trial. He has denied any wrongdoing in relation to both cases.
International treaties allow offshore investors to take their disputes with the Australian government to private arbitration tribunals rather than take their chances with the court system.
Under arbitration rules each side picks a lawyer to sit on a three-person tribunal. The two lawyers then pick the third member.
Despite being an Australian, Mr Palmer is able to get access to the arbitration system because one of his companies, Zeph Investments, is registered in Singapore.
Zeph owns Waratah Coal, which wants to develop a huge coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.
But in 2022 the Queensland Land Court ruled the project should not go ahead because it risked “unacceptable climate change impacts to Queensland people and property”.
Zeph took its dispute to the Switzerland-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in May last year.
Dr Poncet was convicted in 1996 for “personal aiding and abetting and false testimony” during the trial of a man charged with fraud offences over the collapse of Vatican-owned Banco Ambrosiano.
The bank failed in 1982 after a multi-billion dollar scandal that involved politically-connected illegal masonic lodge P2, the mafia and loans to mystery companies in Panama.
Dr Poncet and another man created “fictitious documentation attesting to a commercial transaction” to justify the transfer of $US10m ($A15m) from Banco Ambrosiano to a company in Channel Islands tax haven Jersey, the Milan District Magistrates Court found.
The ruling was upheld by the Milan Court of Appeal but overturned in 1999 by Italy’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, which found that the statute of limitations on the offences had expired.
Dr Poncet said that “the relevance and media interest of accusations brought against me by a rogue trying to avoid punishment more than 30 years ago escapes me”.
He said that in relation to the burkini remark “the suspicion that I would have some anti-Muslim bias is completely ludicrous”, pointing out that he had previously defended the speech rights of Muslim preachers and had been accused of being a traitor to Switzerland for his successful defence of a Muslim client.
Mr Palmer declined to comment.
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