Former top cop Christine Nixon gives evidence at the Lawyer X Royal Commission
Ex-top cop Christine Nixon has blamed her then-deputy Simon Overland for keeping her in the dark about barrister Nicola Gobbo’s role as a secret police informer, saying she only learned of Lawyer X’s identity through the media.
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Former police chief Christine Nixon has refused to accept responsibility for police allowing gangland lawyer Nicola Gobbo to snitch on her clients.
Ms Nixon on Wednesday told the Lawyer X royal commission she was never told about Gobbo’s secret identity as a police source and was kept in the dark by her then-deputy Simon Overland.
Despite telling the inquiry she should have been told about the covert relationship between police and Gobbo, she said the “decisions of individual officers were theirs” and rejected she was ultimately responsible.
The one-time top cop, who served as chief commissioner for eight years throughout Melbourne’s bloody gangland war, said she only learnt of Lawyer X’s identity when it was revealed by the Herald Sun in December last year.
Ms Nixon said she was involved in investigations on a “need to know” basis, but told the commission there were clear opportunities when she could have been told of Gobbo’s dual role.
She laid this responsibility at the feet of her then-deputy, Mr Overland, who had oversight of the crime department, including the gang-busting Purana taskforce.
“I assume people like Simon Overland would have been one,” Ms Nixon said when asked who should have told her. “He’s the person who has continuity through this process, perhaps there were others.”
Ms Nixon said she knew Gobbo had been approached to become a witness in 2009 against suspected corrupt cop Paul Dale, but had no idea the woman known as Informer 3838 had been registered as a source five years earlier.
She told the commission she was kept out of the loop so completely that when news of the scandal first broke she believed Lawyer X was a different female barrister.
She had become aware of Gobbo’s close association with criminal figures including Tony Mokbel and Carl Williams through media reports in the early 2000s.
“I think I saw her on television when she would accompany some of the various offenders as their lawyer and that was really part of it,” she said.
Ms Nixon agreed it would have been “obvious” to Purana investigators which high-profile clients Gobbo was representing at the time.
The same proposition was rejected by Mr Overland later in the day, as it was again suggested he must have known Gobbo was acting for Mokbel at the same time she was informing on him.
Mr Overland maintained he was not aware Gobbo was representing the drug kingpin in court, despite being presented with a prominent newspaper article that included an interview with him and a report on Mokbel fleeing to Greece during his cocaine trafficking trial.
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A photograph of Gobbo accompanied the article.
But Mr Overland said he could not recall having read it, saying he “wasn’t a great reader of the media”.
Ms Nixon joined the growing list of high-ranking officers who stopped keeping diaries during the height of Gobbo’s informing. She has also become the third chief commissioner to reveal she did not keep official records after police chief Graham Ashton, Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius and Mr Overland also admitted they did not keep a police diary.