Slug-gate: Council officer allegedly planted a slug at a food business to destroy it

A slug, Brett Sutton and accusations of a slimy cover-up. Claims of a high-level plot to crush a family’s food business look headed for court.

In France, snails are served with garlic butter. But in Dandenong, according to an outraged family and their lawyers and private investigators and a scientific expert, Garlick can accompany a slug. Allegedly.

This is the starting point for an astounding allegation of an orchestrated cover-up after a council health inspector named Garlick was accused of planting a garden slug in a state-of-the-art food production plant in an act of apparent commercial sabotage.

Sounds far-fetched?

Not once you hear the story in the huge detail that two former detectives have gathered to fill a 6000-page brief of evidence.

That brief will be the centrepiece of a $50m civil damages case the food company is preparing against the state health department and Dandenong Council

— unless, of course, the case is settled to avoid more damaging publicity about an abortive cover-up that stretches from Dandenong to Spring St via certain police officers and senior health officials.

A slug was allegedly imported from elsewhere and planted at the food business. Picture: Supplied

Advisers to the chief police commissioner, to the Premier, the state health minister and to federal opposition leader Anthony Albanese will be reading this and feeling sick.

But nothing like the fear and loathing certain people at Dandenong Council are suffering after the clumsy sabotage attempt that has destroyed a blameless business — and blown up in their faces.

The Day Of The Slug is February 18, 2019, when a health inspector recently appointed by Dandenong Council turns up at the I Cook Foods plant in Zenith Rd, Dandenong, to inspect the premises.

There is nothing strange about officer Elizabeth Garlick doing her job. Regular and thorough inspections of commercial kitchens are necessary to prevent the risk of food contamination that can cause illness or death.

But what strikes the I Cook Foods office manager as unusual is that Garlick is wearing a cover-all smock of the type sometimes used by nurses, with large apron-style pockets in front.

What the office manager also notices is that a bunch of tissues is sticking from one of these pockets. It seems oddly untidy, even unhygienic, for a health inspector.

Officer Garlick is ushered into the plant and asked to put on a clean gown and hairnet, as routinely worn in food production premises.

The gown seems to disconcert her.

She is apparently unaware of a security camera that films her leaving buttons partly undone so she can still reach the pocket of the smock underneath.

But why would she want to do that?

Judging from the security film and witnesses, the answer comes shortly afterwards.

Garlick walks through the plant, politely escorted by Michael Cook, brother and partner of the business principal Ian Cook, whose son Ben also works there.

The camera films Garlick crouching down in the far corner of the factory with her back turned so no one can see her hands.

She crouches for a full 17 seconds.

When she stands up, she makes what Michael Cook later describes as a theatrical announcement that she has “found” a slug.

She produces a camera and photographs a slug she is pointing at, which is next to a piece of wet (or slimy) tissue that has also appeared on the floor in the short time since the floor was washed down with powerful chlorine disinfectant, as it is every day.

But, unfortunately for Garlick and her employer, Michael Cook also snaps a picture of the scene, which will eventually show that Garlick’s photographs are later “photoshopped” to eliminate or minimise the tissue.

Michael Cook’s photograph shows the tissue near the slug but images later produced by Garlick do not — a mysterious anomaly solved when a fellow council health inspector, Kim Rogerson, turns whistleblower and tells the Cooks there’s a conspiracy against them.

Michael Cook’s photograph shows some tissue near the slug but images later produced by Garlick do not. Picture: Supplied

Rogerson, known to the Cooks as a “hard but fair” inspector, admits taking leave to avoid being party to evidence tampering she says was meant to drive I Cook Foods out of business — which it did, due to a strangely rushed decision by the health department, despite laboratory testing that cleared the company of any breach of food safety rules.

That sudden decision condemned more than three tonnes of perfectly good food, worth $700,000, to be sent to the tip after an extraordinary media conference in which health department head Brett Sutton did irreparable damage to the Cooks’ brand.

Sutton claimed — wrongly, despite evidence his department had to the contrary — that I Cook Foods was the source of a serious listeria outbreak which could kill “thousands” of people.

He gratuitously made a point of using the business name, totally unnecessary in any circumstances, as none of its products are sold directly to the public.

Once the I Cook Foods name was publicly trashed, the family business was dead.

The malevolent publicity could never be undone.

The best the Cook family and their growing group of supporters could do after that was expose the true story behind the slimy trick.

Context is everything. The Slug-gate plot did not really begin the day the slug was “found”. And it did not start when an elderly woman, Jean Painter, died in hospital in late 2019 after taking ill at a Knox aged care home supplied by I Cook Foods.

The short lived (and totally disproved) allegation that Jean Painter died of listeria contracted from catering was just an excuse seized by Dandenong Council to harm I Cook Foods.

She in fact died of a longstanding heart condition unrelated to the listeria symptoms of diarrhoea and headache — a temporary illness soon proven to have no link with I Cook Foods.

But why would anyone conspire to destroy I Cook Foods?

Brett Sutton. Picture: NCA NewsWire

Daniel Andrews was health minister in 2010. Picture: Daniel Pockett

The main reason, as the Cooks’ barrister Dr Michelle Sharpe will argue if it gets to court, is that the council CEO John Bennie is on the board of I Cook Foods main commercial competitor, Community Chef, a lame duck enterprise cooked up by several councils, the State Government and the Federal Government in 2010 in response to the GFC.

After an initial flurry of interest in Community Chef, most of the hospitals and aged care homes on the I Cook Foods client list either stuck with the established business or returned after being disappointed by Community Chef’s prices, performance and produce.

Community Chef lost so much money it became an expensive embarrassment to the three tiers of Government funding it — notably to Dandenong Council (among others) but also to the 2010 state health minister, Daniel Andrews, and to the then federal infrastructure minister Anthony Albanese, who sank millions of dollars into Community Chef.

Community Chef’s options were bleak. It could drown in red ink and close down — or it could try to become an “essential service”, which would protect it from competition indefinitely.

But the only way to get on that gravy train, permanently funded by ratepayers and taxpayers, was to eliminate its competitor.

That, says Ian Cook, was the motive for bringing in Elizabeth Garlick as a “rainmaker”.

It is not just a wild allegation by an angry man heartbroken at seeing his 35-year-old family business crushed, and 45 jobs die with it.

It is backed up by more than a year of investigation done for nothing by former detectives Paul Brady and Rod Porter, who became interested in the case after being tipped off by a police source.

After a year of collating massive amounts of detailed material into a watertight brief, Brady is outraged about what has happened to the Cook family.

He has pursued every angle — including other businesses effectively closed down or fined heavily after a certain inspector found “evidence” of the type easily planted.

But why would councils want to monster food businesses so blatantly?

The real reason, Brady says, is financial.

Under an intriguing Victorian law, councils directly pocket the massive fines levied on businesses prosecuted for alleged breaches of food handling rules.

Owner of I Cook Ian Cook outside his business. Picture: David Caird

“In other words, the Food Act is a direct source of revenue,” Brady says.

“It’s a cash cow for council, so their inspectors get the coach’s address from their bosses — and some of these useful idiots want to impress because if they bring in fines they get promotion and pay rises.”

Why would hard bitten ex-cops volunteer to work on a case like this, alongside communications expert Rohan Wenn and others?

Because, Brady says, “if this can happen to someone like Ian Cook it can happen to anyone.”

There are many aspects to the case but some stand out.

A slug expert, Dr Michael Nash, has pointed out that the slug photographed at the factory was not a local variety — it must have been carried in from elsewhere.

When a similar slug was tested at the site, it refused to slide off a clean plastic lid onto the clean floor because slugs (like snails) hate strong cleaning chemicals like the chlorine mixture used daily at the food factory.

Besides, slugs are nocturnal and move around on cool, damp nights — not in the middle of a hot day as it was on February 18, 2019.

The Cook family are not the only people to have suffered.

Among the 45 employees who lost their jobs after Brett Sutton’s brutal “naming and shaming” were several disabled people who worked on full wages under a philanthropic program.

One of them, a profoundly deaf woman, has been unable to get another job, so her elderly parents have lost their house because she was paying it off for them.

If and when it goes to a court, it could be a bruising experience.

For the “useful idiot” Elizabeth Garlick. For Dandenong Council boss John Bennie. For Brett Sutton and key staff who advised him. For the police hierarchy. Even for Daniel Andrews and Anthony Albanese.