Salim Mehajer found guilty of electoral fraud
SALIM MEHAJER and his sister Fatima used hundreds of innocent strangers’ details to rig the council election with a text message exchange that revealed in some cases they were too lazy to figure out whether a voter was a man or a woman.
NSW
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SALIM MEHAJER and his sister Fatima used hundreds of innocent strangers’ details to rig the council election with a text message exchange that revealed in some cases they were too lazy to figure out whether a voter was a man or a woman.
Fatima: “Is mahdy a girl or boy name? Says female ... But sounds like boy name.”
Salim: “Have not specified:). Google It.”
Fatima: “Its both girl and boy.”
Investigators found the brother and sister had enrolled people to vote in the local election at addresses which did not exist as well as incorrectly listing six women as men while others enrolled to vote were not even Australian citizens.
The disgraced former deputy mayor was convicted on 77 charges of electoral fraud after the crown prosecutor withdrew a further 81 back-up offences today.
He will be sentenced alongside his sister Fatima in Central Local Court on June 14.
In a statement published to his Instagram, Mehajer said he would be appealing.
“Press release: I have HUGE confidence in the Justice System and I am sure everything will be okay. I did not give evidence during the trial, though I wish I did – to answer “the gaps”. My new legal team will be respectfully appealing the decision,” the statement said.
In February 2016 The Daily Telegraph spoke with retired couple John and June Clarke who were unwittingly caught up in the scam.
The couple who had lived in their small Auburn townhouse for 40 years were, according to the documents submitted to the AEC, in fact living in a home where Fatima’s husband Jamal Elkheir was supposed to reside.
At the time Mr Clarke, 85, said he did not know Mr Elkheir or any of the Mehajers and was surprised his home was implicated in the case.
It is not suggested Mr Elkheir took part in or had any knowledge of the plan to rig the council election.
“I voted in the 2012 election but I didn’t vote for him,” he said. “All he has done has brought Auburn into disrepute. They’ve got to sort it out.”
Salim Mehajer, who is still in court, just posted this on Instagram. pic.twitter.com/lQbGjz3Ows
— Michaela Whitbourn (@MWhitbourn) 11 April 2018
During her remarks in court on Wednesday Magistrate Schurr said the question of how Salim Mehajer and his sister gained access to hundreds of names and addresses still remained.
“There was no direct evidence as to where most of these names and addresses came from,” she told the court.
“On the one hand, it appears from the text messages that there were ‘hundreds’ of names and addresses at hand to be sent in but that the 6pm deadline meant that some were not.
“One source may have been the electoral rolls — they seem to have been searched according to the text messages.”
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The bankrupt Mehajer arrived at a Sydney’s Central Local Court this morning ready to face the music just a week after he was released on bail from Silverwater jail.
Red flags were raised by Australian Electoral Commission officials when just minutes before the electoral rolls were due to close on July 30, 2012 they received a deluge of online applications requesting address changes.
Magistrate Schurr told the court during an earlier court hearing AEC divisional clerk Yolla Ishak gave evidence detailing her suspicions about the “flood” of online applications which came after 5pm and which the AEC stopped processing.
Question: “Do you know how many online applications you received at about 5 o’clock on the 30th?”
Ms Ishak: “By the time they finished coming through, it’d be about 60, 60, 61, around about that.”
Magistrate Schurr said the online applications could be traced back to two IP addresses connected to a Mehajer business and the family home.
The siblings set up two groups of candidates to run in the election, one in each of Auburn Council’s two wards, each of them running as the lead candidate to give themselves a greater chance of being elected.
Wearing a sharp dark blue suit Mehajer was all smiles as he arrived at court on his own after he previously pleaded not guilty to more than 100 charges of forging AEC enrolments and fabricating a number of addresses for friends and family, claiming they resided in Auburn making them eligible to vote.
The colourful property developer’s long running electoral fraud case has faced delays after he allegedly staged a car crash in October last year to get out of a court appearance on unrelated assault charges.