Disgraced former NT Police Commissioner John Ringland McRoberts found guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice

FORMER police commissioner John McRoberts has been found guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice

Former NT Police commissioner John McRoberts outside the NT Supreme Court

FORMER police commissioner John McRoberts has been found guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

The guilty verdict leaves McRoberts facing a maximum potential jail term of 15 years.

Late in the afternoon, the former commissioner was granted bail by the court to get his affairs in order.

McRoberts, who has looked increasingly exhausted since his trial began almost six weeks ago, has vigorously contested the charge ever since his first court date in 2016.

McRoberts’s legal team had variously suggested he lied about the true nature of his relationship with Kamitsis because “everyone lies about sex”, that his inner circle should have pulled him aside and prevented his involvement in the case after he declared a “social” relationship with Kamitsis, and that he acted legitimately in pursuing a civil debt recovery scheme as an alternative to criminal prosecution.

Kamitsis, the former chair of Crime Stoppers NT, was in 2015 jailed for almost four years on a string of white collar crime charges, but served only nine months in Holtze Prison before being released on home detention.

McRoberts was forced to resign from his job in early 2015 after his secret affair with Kamitsis became known. Thousands of text messages — many of them salacious — were uncovered during a fraud squad raid on her now-defunct Winnellie travel agency, Latitude Travel.