Lawyer X Royal Commission: Top cop once refused to use Nicola Gobbo as an informer
Years before Lawyer X Nicola Gobbo was taken on as a police informer, a senior Victoria Police commander said it was ethically wrong to use the gangland barrister.
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A senior Victoria Police commander “outright rejected” on “ethical grounds” using gangland barrister Nicola Gobbo as a police informer years before she was signed up to provide information on underworld clients.
Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana — when head of the Ethical Standards Department — rejected using Gobbo as an informer in a high-profile police corruption investigation, a witness statement tendered to the Lawyer X royal commission revealed.
It came as Victoria Police was on Monday granted more time to hand over documents relating to Gobbo’s informing on convicted drug baron Rob Karam.
The jailed drug trafficker has been fighting police for almost three years to hand over all documents relating to his barrister and what information she gave police in his case.
Gobbo was officially registered in 2005 and provided police more than 5500 pieces of information on her gangland clients, who included drug barons Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel.
But before that time, former Office of Police Integrity deputy director Brian Hardiman said Mr Fontana, who in the early 2000s was the head of Taskforce Ceja, told him Gobbo was “too unreliable”.
“Steve Fontana spoke to me about a proposal to use Gobbo as an informer. I believe this might have been discussed by police command but was outright rejected by Fontana on ethical grounds and the fact she was unreliable. I agreed with Fontana,” Mr Hardiman said in his statement released by the Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants.
Earlier, the commission heard a handler with the unit that managed Gobbo from 2005 to 2009 said he had concerns about using Gobbo due to the risk posed to her life and the potential she might be a double agent.
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The handler, under the pseudonym Officer Paige, said he was dismayed police would use Gobbo as an informer when they had denied his request to run a human source who had information about the 1991 murder of 13-year-old Karmein Chan because the source was not a “person of integrity” and was “tainted”.
“I found it astounding that management would approve a job with an underworld solicitor going after drug dealers when we had a chance, possibly, to catch a child murderer.”