Leon Roussakis, Edward Watt plead guilty over waste dumping scam
A Sydney building rubble merchant and the boss of a concrete recycling company conspired to dump more than $3 million of waste in Canberra for free. Now the duo face time behind bars for the scam.
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A shonky Sydney rubble merchant conspired with the highly-paid boss of a Canberra concrete recycling company in an 11-month corporate deception that left the Canberra business short-changed by more than $3 million.
The former general manager of Canberra Concrete Recyclers, Edward Anthony Watt, 56, pleaded guilty in the ACT Supreme Court on Friday to providing false or misleading information to a company director, a white collar crime that carries a potential five year jail sentence.
His partner in crime, Sydney building rubble merchant Leon Roussakis, 49, pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting Watt.
The pair’s guilty pleas on Friday marked the end of drawn-out negotiations between lawyers.
According to documents tendered in court, Roussakis was the owner and operator of Tip It Interstate, a Sydney company that trucked tons of building rubble into the ACT every night to get around NSW waste levies.
A statement of agreed facts shows Watt, of Tarago in NSW, and Roussakis, of Earlwood in Western Sydney, hatched a plan so Roussakis’s company could dump waste at about half the advertised cost.
The deal was kept secret from the director of Canberra Concrete Recyclers until he became suspicious, and a review of security camera footage revealed Roussakis’s company’s trucks regularly coming onto the site — near Canberra Airport — and dumping tons of waste between 2am and 6.30am.
In total, an investigation found Roussakis’s company dumped 855 B-double trucks carrying more than 30,000 tons of rubble for free.
That much rubble should have cost Roussakis $3.2 million to dump.
The deception came unstuck when the Canberra business’s eagle-eyed office manager noticed there was sometimes a delay in Roussakis’s truck’s weighbridge records being logged.
The Canberra business’s director also became suspicious that waste piles were continuing to grow.
The director ultimately confronted Watt, who, according to court documents, had enjoyed “pretty free reign” in the day-to-day running of the business.
Watt was sacked on the spot in October 2016, nearly a year after Roussakis dumped his first free load of rubble.
In a phone call bugged by police after Watt was sacked from his job, he was heard calling his former boss a “f**king cocksucker”, saying “a few deals were struck with people” and admitting “maybe we shouldn’t have let so many in for nothing, but at the end of the day, we did what we did”.
They return to court in December.