Taxpayers will cover the bill for broke drug lord Tony Mokbel’s conviction appeal

Broke drug lord Tony Mokbel will have the cost of appealing his conviction covered by the taxpayer as the five-year saga drags on.

Tony Mokbel has been granted legal aid for his appeal.

Broke drug lord Tony Mokbel has been granted legal aid in his bid to appeal his convictions.

The granting of funding by Victoria Legal Aid to Mokbel is the latest in an almost five-year saga he has waged to appeal his convictions over massive drug trafficking.

Mokbel, 56, is serving a 30-year sentence but is fighting to walk free from prison.

The gangland figure pleaded guilty to multiple drug offence charges in 2011.

But the charismatic Barwon Prison inmate lodged an appeal in 2017 over the Lawyer X fiasco.

Former barrister Nicola Gobbo — dubbed Lawyer X by the Herald Sun — was Mokbel’s go-to lawyer from the late 1990s until at least 2007.

Gobbo began informing on Mokbel to Victoria Police after it registered the then-barrister as a “human source” in September of 2005.

The force recruited Gobbo while she began acting for him in a major trial relating to the importation of 3kg of cocaine from Mexico.

Mokbel was convicted of the importation in March 2006, just days after going on the run.

That conviction was quashed in 2020, due to Gobbo’s involvement in the trial.

Nicola Gobbo was recruited by police while representing Tony Mokbel.

The flamboyant gangster also called Gobbo from Greece after his arrest following a 15-month international manhunt.

Mokbel’s appeal has been delayed by court battles over the production of documents by Victoria Police.

The delays have led to Mokbel being unable to continue funding his legal team, which was headed by Ruth Shann, SC.

Mokbel applied to Victoria Legal Aid for help as the case ground to halt.

The former Brunswick resident was once estimated to have assets of $20m, including properties, a Ferrari and cash holdings, which were seized by police.

In previous hearings, the Supreme Court has heard Mokbel was dealing with a “high level of distress’’ since first filing his appeal.

Earlier this year, the court heard Mokbel had narrowly escaped death in February 2019, when two inmates attacked him.

Mokbel has since languished in an isolation unit of the maximum security jail where he has where he gets to spend a little time in a concrete yard alone each day.

Those conditions led Mokbel to go on a hunger strike.

Mokbel’s new legal team, which includes Julie Condon, QC, Chris Wareham and Lee Ristivojevic, will work out a timetable with the Office of Public Prosecutions for the case to proceed to a hearing.