Financial failure, unpaid taxes and deadly history no barrier to CFMEU promotion

A booming scaffolding firm that has secured significant contracts on the $550 million redevelopment of the nation’s war memorial, a major hospital, Sydney Metro and a public school has been repeatedly promoted by the CFMEU, despite a catastrophic safety record and alleged links to a bikie boss and other underworld figures.

Synergy Scaffolding Services and its related entities have not only secured union backing for multiple enterprise bargaining agreements but, according to union and industry sources, been repeatedly informally pushed by sacked NSW CFMEU boss Darren Greenfield onto work sites around the state.

The allegations follow the Building Bad investigation by this masthead, The Australian Financial Review, and 60 Minutes which has plunged Australia’s largest construction union into administration over alleged links to organised crime, corruption and standover tactics.

Five industry insiders, including four who have served as building union delegates or organisers but who asked to remain anonymous citing fears of repercussions, slammed the CFMEU’s continuing promotion of Synergy despite the firm being fined millions of dollars after two judges found it responsible for exposing workers to avoidable fatal and near-fatal injuries.

Christopher Cassaniti (centre) celebrates his 18th birthday with family.

The parents of one young worker killed on a Synergy site in 2019 labelled the union’s promotion of the company unacceptable.

First-year formwork apprentice Christopher Cassaniti died two days after his 18th birthday when 17 tonnes of Synergy scaffolding collapsed on him, crushing him as he called out desperately for his mother.

A NSW District Court judge found Synergy had “grossly overloaded” the scaffolding by more than 16 tonnes as it raced to complete a large residential project in the Sydney suburb of Macquarie Park.

“The offence is of the utmost objective gravity … [and] should serve as a telling reminder that unsafe acts on a building site can and do lead to catastrophic consequences,” the judge found.

In November 2022, the judge fined Synergy $2 million, at the time the highest penalty recorded for a SafeWork offence.

Rob and Patrizia Cassaniti say the union’s backing of Synergy is unacceptable.Credit: 60 Minutes

“No worker should ever go to work and die,” said Cassaniti’s mother, Patrizia, who also worked on the Synergy site. “He had such an amazing life ahead of him and it was stolen from him.”

Despite the anguish of Cassaniti’s parents, Synergy never paid the fine for the death of the young scaffolder.

In February this year, Synergy put itself into liquidation, saying it had no ability to pay the $2 million fine or the $2.2 million it owed to the Australian Taxation Office.

Greenfield, the NSW union boss, publicly slammed the safety protocols at the Macquarie Park site after the 2019 tragedy and said there was no excuse for “a worker on a construction site to pass away because of money and a program”.

“I mean, you see grown men crying, and you just think not again, not another one, not another person not going home tonight,” Greenfield told 60 Minutes in 2019.

But this masthead can reveal Greenfield has since personally signed multiple enterprise bargaining agreements with Synergy-related companies, including with its largest successor, SSS.

Like Synergy, SSS is directed by Mohamad El Jarrar, 41, and chaired by Hussein “Sam” Soukie, 38. Another company with links to the same families, Lenovo Management (formerly known as Synergy Scaffolding Group), has also been awarded an agreement by the union since the collapse.

“They were promoted for every major job by the CFMEU,” said one former union organiser.

The EBAs have allowed SSS to seize market share from non-union-aligned firms including on major projects in Sydney such as the Sirius building in The Rocks, the $1.8 billion Chifley South skyscraper in the heart of the CBD, the Barangaroo Metro station and residential builds worth more than $1 billion, plus the Shoalhaven Hospital in Nowra. Greenfield was unable to be reached for comment.

The Sirius building in The Rocks. Credit: Wolter Peeters

“To hear that, [the CFMEU] have given Synergy a bit of a leg-up, I find that quite disappointing. I didn’t know that was going on,” said Cassaniti’s father, Rob Cassaniti.

Synergy has now also diversified its operations into the lucrative Indigenous procurement sector.

An Indigenous scaffolding company, Yaga Corp, run by former Olympic boxer Paul Fleming, is run out of the same Sydney address as Synergy in Beverly Hills, in southern Sydney, and also has an EBA with the CFMEU. SSS is one of its shareholders.

Yaga has partnered with skip bin provider Purple Cow, also at the same address, which lists El Jarrar and Soukie as its current and former directors. Yaga has won contracts with Lendlease to provide safe-access platforms to Fort Street Public School in Millers Point.

Now SSS has plans to expand overseas after buying the Australian arm of Indian scaffolding giant Technocrat in 2021.

In February, SSS said it was the first Australian construction company to launch operations in Saudi Arabia after Soukie lobbied the kingdom’s leaders to join the $1.5 trillion NEOM project.

SSS chairman Sam Soukie with Sheik Mohammed AlQahtani, from Saudi Arabia Holding Co. Credit: LinkedIn

This masthead and 60 Minutes can also reveal Synergy has alleged organised crime links including to the slain boss of the Comanchero bikie gang, Mick Hawi, who was a silent partner in Synergy.

A Sydney court heard that Hawi, who was a known standover man, “increased the company’s profits in a very short time”.

Former bikies boss Mick Hawi.

Former NSW Police organised crime commander Rob Critchlow described Hawi as one of Australia’s leading organised crime figures. “[He was] deeply connected in the underworld,” Critchlow said.

Hawi was murdered outside a Rockdale gym in 2018. Within hours of his murder, his widow, Carolina Gonzalez, obtained a court order authorising posthumous sperm retrieval from the body of the slain bikie boss.

Gonzalez, 44, is now living with Soukie, the SSS chairman, in a $3.8 million house in Mount Vernon, replete with one hectare of manicured private gardens, a pool, bar and snooker room.

Synergy’s former director and operations manager at the time of Cassaniti’s death, Ali Hamka, was caught in the middle of a brutal gangland war between the Darwiche and Razzak families over drug supply in western Sydney in the early 2000s.

Carolina Gonzales, widow of former Comanchero boss Mahmoud “Mick” Hawi.Credit: Rhett Wyman

In October 2003, four gunmen fired 100 shots into Hamka’s fibro house in Greenacre, in Sydney’s west. Hamka’s 22-year-old partner, Melissa Nemra, was killed, as was the target of the hit, Ziad Razzak, who was on parole for drug-related offences.

It is not suggested that Hamka, 44, also known as Robert Zaidder, had any involvement in drugs.

When another worker, Bilal Alelaimat, suffered a major spinal injury while working for Synergy in 2012, NSW Supreme Court judge Stephen Campbell was scathing about Hamka’s attempt to avoid responsibility.

The court heard Alelaimat, a driver, was ordered by Hamka to help dismantle scaffolding at a worksite in Artarmon. The driver “was struck from above by a falling 2.4-metre-long metallic scaffolding plank caked in concrete”.

During the 2020 court case, a furious Hamka, who at one stage stormed out of the witness box, had tried to claim that Synergy Scaffolding did not employ any scaffolders directly and that they were supplied by labour-hire companies.

“It is impossible to say that Mr Hamka was in any way an impressive witness,” the judge said. “He was belligerent to the point of aggressiveness, argumentative and offensive to counsel” and was “outright facetious to the point of scurrilousness on occasions”.

As a result of Synergy’s negligence, it was ordered to pay $1.35 million to Alelaimat. Hamka’s son, Mohammed Hamka, 24, is now a director of SSS AUS and SSS NSW.

Hamka and Soukie did not respond to requests for comment through their companies, SSS and Synergy Scaffolding.

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Synergy has emerged as one of the clearest case studies of companies with highly dubious histories that have nevertheless been promoted by union officials, including those accused of corruption.

A major task facing the administrator of the CFMEU, Mark Irving, KC, who was formally appointed on Friday, will be unpicking why firms such as Synergy have received union backing.

Rob Critchlow, who prior to retiring as NSW Police organised crime commander in May led two building industry taskforces, one targeting union corruption and the second targeting organised crime-linked firms, said some CFMEU officials were firmly entrenched in a corrupt building industry ecosystem that included bikies and underworld figures.

He said some parts of the CFMEU “behave like a crime gang” with “closed networks” that “shuns external scrutiny [and is]… ripe for corruption”.

Former police commander Rob Critchlow.Credit: Louise Kennerley

Critchlow also said previous law enforcement, policy and regulatory attempts to clean up corruption and organised crime infecting the CFMEU and some building firms had failed.

He said “really strong regulatory, legislative action” was needed to send the message “the community won’t accept organised crime involved in the building industry”.

In 2021, an ATO audit found Synergy had claimed millions of dollars in tax deductions that were potentially fraudulent and based on invoices that were not genuine.

One of the companies that received payments from Synergy was GSP Projects, a labour and equipment hire company that had no employees and no assets, apart from a bank account.

The ATO found that the payments made to GSP were then withdrawn in cash. GSP’s registered office was at Banq Accountants, and GSP’s sole director was George Said.

Banq was run by accountant Gino Cassaniti (no relation to Christopher Cassaniti), who was bankrupted in 2014 owing $1.1 million to the ATO. Cassaniti, 50, also has a conviction for stalking and intimidating with intent to cause fear or harm, over the alleged kidnapping of a luxury clothing buyer in an attempt to force him to hand over an estimated $200,000 worth of high-end garments. Cassaniti was initially charged with kidnapping offences, but he later pleaded guilty to the lesser charges of stalking and intimidating with fear of physical harm.

Cassaniti denied he had any relationship with Synergy or its directors.

George Said said he did not know what GSP projects did. “Nothing was actually done by me, Gino was running that,” he said.

In an unrelated court matter, Cassaniti and others from Banq were found to have been involved in a conspiracy to disguise or hide income that would otherwise be taxable.

In 2021, Justice Julie Ward found that Cassaniti had been involved in a conspiracy to help companies, not connected to Synergy, to avoid paying tax. She found that he was liable for more than $20 million, which the various companies should have paid in tax and GST.

The court heard that “there was not one genuine commercial document for any of the transactions” issued by the group of five insolvent companies and that Cassaniti was “acting dishonestly and fraudulently” and was using “carousel payments” or round-robin transactions “effectively for money laundering”.

Ward held that Cassaniti was a “primary conspirator” who had breached the Corporations Act.

In his report filed to the corporate watchdog, ASIC, in May 2024, Synergy’s liquidator, Shumit Banerjee, noted that the ATO had concluded that Synergy might have avoided tax “due to both fraud and tax evasion”.

Banerjee also noted that from July 2015 to April 2017, Synergy also claimed tax deduction invoices, which the ATO found were not genuine, and were submitted by a company called SRP which itself has gone into liquidation after failing to pay its tax obligations.

The liquidator’s report also revealed that Kidman Workforce, a company associated with Hamka, received weekly payments totalling $2.4 million for a two-year period until April 2021.

Other failed companies, which had the same directors or shareholders as Synergy, installed a director, Aman Kalil, just before the companies collapsed. Kalil was disqualified from being a director due to being an undischarged bankrupt since 2008 as well as having gone to jail for tax fraud.

Most of the CFMEU’s branches around the country were placed in administration on Friday. Greenfield and other senior figures in the NSW branch slammed the federal government for taking the action while a court case was still afoot.

Disaffected CFMEU members have organised nationwide protests to be held on Tuesday.

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