By Kishor Napier-Raman and Noel Towell
You’d be hard-pressed to find too many willing to show up at a memorial for Roger Rogerson, Australia’s most notoriously crooked cop who died last month while serving a life sentence for murder.
“The Dodger”, as Rogerson came to be known (owing to a handy knack of getting away with crimes) was cremated at Macquarie Park cemetery a couple of weeks ago, with a subsequent secret memorial attended by a select group of his last remaining friends.
A surprisingly notable face among the mourners was pub baron Arthur Laundy, whose sprawling empire is worth north of $1 billion.
He’s the father of Craig Laundy, a former minister in the Turnbull government who emerged from post-political obscurity to deliver a few rather candid character assessments on the ABC’s recent Nemesis documentary which depicted the highlights from the Liberals’ last stint in power.
Laundy jnr returned to the family business after politics and is co-chair of Liberal powerbroker Joe Tannous’ lobbying shop Cornerstone Group. He probably could’ve told his dad the memorial wasn’t a great idea.
Also in attendance was Gary McIntyre, who as president of the Canterbury Bulldogs was the architect of the club’s infamous 2002 salary cap rort. McIntyre is, inexplicably, a bit of a Rogerson supporter, showing up during the copper’s 2016 trial for the murder of student and drug dealer Jamie Gao.
Since his ousting after the salary cap scandal, McIntyre has made a controversial return to the board of Canterbury Leagues Club in 2022, where he still serves. Laundy’s company, meanwhile, is the jersey sponsor of the perennially struggling Bulldogs.
We’re not sure how these two ended up so close to Rogerson, and neither was particularly forthcoming. McIntyre didn’t return CBD’s calls and Laundy was politely evasive when contacted.
“I was asked not to talk about it, so I won’t,” he said.
Fair enough, we wouldn’t be crowing about it either.
Illustration: John Shakespeare
RANSOM SWEAR
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, in this age of incivility, that big-time cyber criminals might step outside the bounds of polite discourse as they go about their business.
But CBD’s delicate sensibilities were nonetheless offended when we learnt how the suspected Russian hacking group Blackcat responded last year when they found out law firm HWL Ebsworth would not pay the $4 million ransom demanded by the crooks for a massive trove of the firm’s data purloined from its Melbourne servers.
“F--- you faggot,” the crims emailed to Ebsworth after the firm took legal action to restrain the use of the data instead of handing over the cash as the criminals had demanded.
On the upside, we were delighted by the wry take on that exchange by NSW Supreme Court Judge Michael Slattery this week, as he made permanent a temporary injunction on the use or dissemination of the material stolen from Australia’s largest legal partnership.
“The Court infers from the terse three-word message, ‘f--- you faggot’, in the response, that some of the threat actors were displeased that HWLE had taken legal proceedings rather than paying the ransom,” Slattery wrote in his judgment.
Maybe those Hack Cats might take some tips from Slattery J on conversational deportment.
KYIV KINGSTON
On Wednesday, CBD encountered mop-haired entrepreneur Phillip Kingston as a side character in the colourful business history of “doping Olympics” dude Aron D’Souza.
But Kingston’s own recent travails deserve a whole column of their own. To recap, Sargon Capital, the fintech superannuation company he founded in 2015 with D’Souza (featuring ex-Labor minister Stephen Conroy and then Crown Resorts boss Rob Rankin) as board members, spectacularly immolated five years on.
The unravelling began in early 2020 when Chinese-state run financier China Taiping, one of Sargon’s creditors, put the firm into receivership. According to documents tabled in parliament by then Liberal MP Tim Wilson a year later, China Taiping had allegedly misdirected payments to engineer a receivership and take control of Sargon.
This narrative was blown up by the Victorian Supreme Court, which found the receivership wasn’t wrongful, with Justice Jim Delaney ruling that Kingston was “just not a credible witness”.
Kingston was bankrupted over $154 million he owed to China Taiping following the Victorian judgment. Facing such parlous financial troubles at home, Kingston has found two zeitgeisty foreign causes to keep him busy – the battle for Ukrainian freedom, and artificial intelligence.
He lived in Kyiv through 2023, and is listed as an executive director of Cyber Diia, a not-for-profit that aims to unite innovators to “build a resilient and safe digital future of Ukraine”.
And in late December, he listed as a foreign agent on the Attorney-General department’s transparency register over his role as the executive officer for something called the Cyber Action platform, which is affiliated with the Ukrainian government’s wartime fundraising efforts.
But it seems like Kyiv wasn’t forever – according to LinkedIn, Kingston has since moved to the gaudy Emirati capital of Abu Dhabi for a gig at the Applied Artificial Intelligence Company.
Real Mr Worldwide areas.