From internal affairs to infernal silence at ACIC; Surely they’re having a lend of us?

Former ASIO deputy director-general and now ACIC chief executive Heather Cook.

Much fallout spreading from an internal investigation taking place inside the Sydney office of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, a national law enforcement body that’s supposed to be full of hot-shots but is struggling badly to keep its house in order.

Problems there started a year ago, when a retired judge was asked to investigate the conduct of ACIC’s operations manager, Greg Schott, who was suspended with pay over allegations of an undeclared conflict of interest and discrepancies with his corporate travel and spending. Suspended, too, was a senior lawyer at the ACIC who worked closely with Schott.

Sure is taking a rather long time for any outcome to be made known in either of their cases, which tells us the matter is probably more complicated than the ACIC’s toecutters might have originally hoped.

Besides, conflicts are seemingly everywhere at ACIC. We’ve already written about executive director Virginia Hartley. She turned up at Brisbane’s Supreme Court in 2022 in support of convicted criminal Mark Dumenil during a cocaine importation trial. No issues with that, apparently; Hartley’s gone on to give evidence on behalf of ACIC in parliament as recently as December. Dumenil just happens to be her brother-in-law.

What we hear now is that another four employees who worked with Schott are being examined as part of the ongoing internal inquiries, the most senior being Peter Morgan, the ACIC’s director of NSW examinations, these being the quasi-judicial hearings held in-house before a judge and a counsel assisting.

The allegations being levelled appear to revolve around the falsification of vehicle logs, the use of agency cars on a personal basis, and the writing off of speeding and traffic fines. All of which isn’t exactly cash-in-a-bag corruption, and we can only wonder if these inquiries are just screws being turned to try to rat out Schott and finally see him off.

In any case, Morgan and the others were under instruction to respond to these allegations by earlier this month, not that the ACIC would confirm a word of this when we asked it for a response. As they say, technically this is all supposed to be a big secret.

“The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) will not be providing further comment,” a spokeswoman said.

“Any provision of information to you regarding the ACIC is potentially unlawful and may be a criminal offence under our legislative framework.”

But so clearly it’s more than a little chaotic inside the ACIC right now with the get-squares and internal hits and at least six people facing dismissal. All of which poses a fresh challenge for newly appointed CEO Heather Cook, erstwhile of spy agency ASIO where she was deputy director-general.

She’s far away from Canberra’s Chifley building now, the ACIC looking more like Slough House these days – without the loveable cast of slow horses.

Having a Lendlease

Oh, god, make it stop. Two consecutive days of ill-timed puff in the Fin Review featuring Lendlease’s embattled CEOs, at just the moment when the company is under siege from investors and engaging banks to carve out its overseas construction arm – because it’s all performing so badly.

Clearly no better time for the company’s global chief, Tony Lombardo, to embrace his inner ham and give a self-deprecating interview, published on Tuesday. Lombardo talked up his love of the Foo Fighters, karaoke, yoga, stretching, dreams of travelling around Europe and Australia, and his penchant for running and singing (at the same time) like “a crazy person”.

The eyes roll back reading this sort of stuff but, look, we can hardly blame Lombardo for his answers when the questions themselves are dixers by design and softer than anything written by Drake. (“Are you a breakfast guy?”)

Lendlease global boss Tony Lombardo.

The only thing worse than one schmaltzy interview published in the midst of a PR crisis for Lendlease? A second interview published the very next day with its Australian chief, Dale Connor. You bet it was replete with more of the same guff, as you’d expect: Connor’s preferred cafe; his coffee order (“I have a skinny flat white with one sugar”); his preference for blueberry muffins in the morning.

Perhaps the only useful piece of information was Connor’s remark that he arrives in the office around 6.30am. Much earlier than Lombardo, who swans in sometime between 7.30 and 8am. Not that we’d blame the dwindling share price on any of that.

ASIC’s Nuix woes

ASIC just can’t catch a trick with Nuix, as we’ve all come to notice. Just this week the corporate regulator announced that it would drop its investigation into CEO Jonathan Rubinsztein, citing a lack of evidence.

And that would be the second time ASIC has abandoned a probe into the company, the other being its examination of Nuix’s financial statements ahead of its listing in 2020; that was over claims the company had lied in its prospectus documents.

Curious, too, that ASIC is one of several high-profile clients of Nuix, and despite all of its investigative attention on the company, the regulator has hardly cut ties with the business – actually, its tipping millions of dollars in cash its way.

So goes a note posted by ASIC on the AusTender website in recent days saying it had invested a further $3m into its contract with Nuix, taking the total spend to $8m. That’s supposed to pay for software designed to assist with early case assessment and evidence management, for investigations.

Here’s hoping they finally get some use out of it.