Turmoil has erupted within the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, a national law enforcement body whose hearings and tactics are covered in more secrecy than the Manhattan Project.
Two of its most senior employees have been suspended from their duties and a retired judge has been drafted to examine a multitude of allegations levelled against them.
The higher-ranking of the two is Greg Schott, the ACIC’s Sydney-based operations manager. He was poached from the NSW Police Force in 2017 following some admirable work targeting low-altitude members of the Ibrahim family.
Renowned for developing field assets, Schott’s been stood down with pay over allegations of an undeclared conflict of interest and discrepancies with his corporate travel and spending. The employee stood down with Schott is one of ACIC’s prominent lawyers.
The decision to discipline these employees involved Virginia Hartley, ACIC’s executive director for intelligence operations. And on the topic of alleged conflicts, Margin Call wonders if she’s been sufficiently upfront about a few wrinkles of her own.
A year ago, Hartley was photographed alongside convicted criminal Mark Dumenil during his cocaine importation trial in the Brisbane Supreme Court, an odd look for someone of Hartley’s station and responsibility. Turns out she was there providing moral support because, as Margin Call has learned, he happens to be her brother-in-law.
Complicating matters further is that Schott was one of the investigators who gathered the intelligence on Dumenil, leading to Dumenil’s trial and a prison term of up to 11 years.
Dumenil and his co-conspirator were linked to more than two dozen kilograms of cocaine that had been imported in a shipping container from Columbia in 2018. Federal Police followed the package and, embarking on one of the oldest tricks in the book, replaced the powder with an inert substance. Embedded microphones recorded Dumenil salivating over his coming payday, saying silly things like, “We are going to get good f…ing money out of this. It’s going to be ridiculous.”
No suggestion that Schott’s been stood down as a get-square for any of that, of course, but Margin Call did ask the ACIC if Hartley ever declared her affiliation with Dumenil, or sought permission to attend court, or whether she provided a reference for Dumenil on sentencing. The ACIC didn’t respond to these questions, or to questions about Schott, but an official provided a one-line response saying the agency “is aware that an ACIC employee attended one of their extended family member’s court appearances in a personal capacity”. Which kind of sounds like they became aware of it upon Margin Call’s inquiry.
Meanwhile, the ACIC’s staff have been atwitter with dissatisfaction since the November departure of former CEO Mike Phelan, now a strategic adviser at corporate investigations firm Kroll. Efforts to recruit a successor led to more than a dozen qualified candidates, none of whom apparently satisfied Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus.
Fossil fuel rebrand
The stodgily titled Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association is undergoing a drastic rebranding, which is something of a relief because its current name is annoying to say out loud and takes up too much space in print.
Notionally called APPEA, Margin Call understands options have been tried out on select individuals in parliament, including the compact and anodyne-sounding Energy Producers Australia, which has a whiff of the greenwash to it. The EPA, huh? It brings to mind solar panels and wind turbines, not the fossil fuel majors that the APPEA actually represents.
Funny that the peak lobby, led by CEO Samantha McCulloch, is trying to keep its branding away from the words “oil” and “gas”. Chalk that up as a win for the activists?
A struggling agency, flat-footed on policy, it’s seen an exodus of personnel over the past 12 months. And while the rebranding hasn’t been formally announced, Margin Call has heard of fresh logos being tried out. One would have thought APPEA officials might have wanted to clarify all this, but they declined to comment.
No cheque in the mail
Margin Call reported over the weekend that bonuses at Australia Post might be at risk given the $200m loss announced by the agency on Thursday. Paul Graham left everyone hanging during a company-wide Town Hall, held hours after the results came out; the chief executive was asked if the bonuses would still be paid but Graham wouldn’t confirm either way. “It’s something the business will be looking at,” he said.
This column noted that Graham himself wouldn’t suffer either way, given that only 25 per cent of his bonus is tied to financial performance. Whether that had any bearing on his thinking in the days following isn’t clear, but what’s known is that he re-emerged on Monday to tell staff that they would, indeed, receive their yearly performance bump.
However! There’s a caveat: the bonuses will be modest, around 50 per cent of the negotiated value, and, for many, they’ll probably be the last. From next year Australia Post will scrap bonus payments altogether and simply raise salaries, much as other government-owned organisations have done, including NBN Co, which did this last year.
Still, NBN Co retained bonus payments for the C-suite executives, with Australia Post confirming it would do the same. One rule for some, eh?
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