The red flags that brought down Mehajer siblings
Salim Mehajer and his sister Fatima are both facing potential jail terms over their roles in rigging the 2012 local government elections to get him elected to Auburn Council. Here are the red flags, which showed how Mehajer used the details of voters without their knowledge to secure his position on the council.
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Salim Mehajer and his sister Fatima are both facing potential jail terms over their roles in rigging the 2012 local government elections to get the disgraced property developer elected to Auburn Council.
Both have been convicted and will face sentencing hearings this year.
This came after a complex three year investigation by the Australian Federal Police.
In April 2016, The Sunday Telegraph revealed how Mehajer used the details of voters without their knowledge to secure his position on the council.
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On March 29, 2011 — 18 months before the local government election where Mehajer was elected to Auburn Council — the fax machine at the Australian Electoral Commission’s Strathfield office was in overdrive.
In minutes, the office received 37 voter enrolment forms all from the same Auburn-based fax number.
Several other features on the forms raised the concerns of staff, including 13-year veteran AEC investigator Ian Herps, that they could be fraudulent.
Mr Herps would later tell investigators from the Australian Federal Police that all of the faxes appeared to have been completed in the same handwriting, the signatures didn’t match those on file, and some of the addresses listed didn’t exist.
A more obvious red flag was that all the faxes had a 3cm-wide light grey toner strip running the length of each page, Mr Herps told police.
On July 30, 2012, Mr Herps was copied into an email sent to the AEC’s national management team explaining that the Reid office had received 57 online enrolments between 5pm and 6pm.
Some of the names and addresses matched the 37 sent to the office 18 months earlier, which were part of Mr Herps’ investigation.
This latest batch of 57 were lodged on the deadline day for residents to be enrolled to vote in the September 8 local government elections.
The red flag this time was that all 57 were sent from two computer IP addresses: one located at Salim Mehajer’s Lidcombe home and the other at Mehajer’s Sefton office, prosecutors will allege.
An internal review by the AEC found that 26 other application forms lodged earlier that day had also come from Mehajer’s IP addresses. None were processed after AEC staff marked them as suspicious, Mr Herps told investigators.
One of the applications included Mehajer changing his enrolment details to state he lived with 11 other people in a three-bedroom apartment on Park Rd, Auburn. The AEC sent its findings for the Australian Federal Police.
What followed was a three-year investigation that saw the AFP charge Mehajer with 76 counts of using a forged documents and another of using false or misleading documents last December.
