Pub baron’s drink-driving charge the tip of a bigger booze-berg; EDO back for more miner bashing

Peter De Angelis will be sentenced in Liverpool Local Court next Wednesday.

There’s nothing quite as sobering as a police facts sheet, the language always as blunt and clear as stone-dry champagne.

Or perhaps white wine is what we should say in the case of powerful pub baron Peter De Angelis, glasses of vino having been his poison of choice on the afternoon of April 1. 

What resulted was a high-range blood-alcohol reading of 0.171 when De Angelis was stopped by police at 8.49pm. He’ll be sentenced next Wednesday, in Liverpool Local Court – an inconvenience we revealed in this column a week ago.

The bit we didn’t know is that De Angelis, the son of pub nobles Robyn and Arch De Angelis and nephew of rich-lister Arthur Laundy, is a serial drink-driving offender. This latest offence is his fourth time commandeering vehicles on land and at sea in a state of high inebriation. 

Police made sure to emphasise this point when De Angelis pleaded guilty before a magistrate last month. When they stopped him in Darlinghurst his breath stank of booze, they said, his eyes were bloodshot and he was slurring his words. This, they pointed out, was nearly three hours after he’d allegedly quaffed his last glug of wine. 

“The accused has prior convictions for driving both cars and boats while intoxicated,” the police facts sheet said. “His behaviour is clearly not changing and his attitude towards his offending indicates a lack of respect for other road users and the law.” 

De Angelis has been fortunate enough, previously, to have these priors go unmentioned in the press but here they are in descending order for the sake of posterity:

• Last year, he received a nine-month community correction order and a fine of $1200 for mid-range drink-driving while in charge of a boat;

• In 2021, he was fined $1000 for another mid-range drink-driving offence, this time at the wheel of a car.

• And that followed a seven-year dry spell from his first known offence, dated 2014, when he was charged with high-range drink driving – again on a boat, this bizarre predilection for drunk-piloting seaworthy vessels apparently only surpassed by Captain Jack Sparrow.

De Angelis may face the prospect of jail time unless his suburban lawyer presents a compelling argument to the contrary next week. Neither of them wanted to provide remarks when contacted for an explanation. 

But De Angelis did speak to officers on the night of his offending, coming clean that he’d drunk six glasses of wine at the Imperial Hotel, in Paddington, between 3pm and 6pm.

He hadn’t eaten any food that afternoon either, despite the offering of a $20 rump steak special available at the pub. An empty stomach isn’t much of a mitigating circumstance, but De Angelis still has time to declare himself a vegetarian if he gets desperate.

Who knows if any of this will have a bearing on his position with the board of DHI Hotels and Investments, the family’s sprawling pub and tavern empire. What’s certain is that he’s not the only DHI director known for a pattern of drink-driving. 

His brother, Philip, saddled with his own set of priors, was written up in 2020 for blowing 0.086 while cruising the streets of Surry Hills, apparently, and improbably, while seeking to get a haircut.

He was on his phone at the time, as well, an aggravating circumstance. But there’s really no need to air out all that dirty laund(r)y. YB

Bruised EDO hedges its bets for new battle

You can’t say the Environmental Defenders Office hasn’t learned anything from the legal shellacking by Santos over its behaviour when running an unsuccessful case to block the oil and gas company’s Barossa development.

Readers may remember that Justice Natalie Charlesworthdelivered a scathing indictment against the EDO when dismissing the case in early 2024, ruling the legal group – partly funded by the taxpayer – had engaged in “subtle coaching” when meeting with Tiwi Islanders who brought the case.

EDO had to pay $9m worth of Santos costs for the case, after the oil and gas major went to court to get details of the donors who backed its legal push.

It handed over the money to Santos late last year. According to its last annual report, the EDO only staved off bankruptcy by borrowing $6.5m from an unnamed lender.

It remains to be seen whether the legal group has learned any lessons from Justice Charlesworth’s blistering criticism of the way it conducted the case. But the EDO has certainly learned a few lessons about financial risk.

A gas platform which is part of Woodside Energy’s Scarborough project in the Carnarvon Basin off the WA coast.

Last week the EDO was back in court against an oil and gas company, and the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA), this time representing Doctors for the Environment (Australia) Inc in a bid to try to block Woodside Energy’s Scarborough gas project in WA.

The merits of the case are yet to be aired in court, though. This application was an attempt to limit the costs NOPSEMA and Woodside can claim back in legals if the case fails.

Like the EDO, Doctors for the Environment is a registered charity. It pulled in about $637,000 last financial year from donations and running a conference, spent around the same amount, and was sitting on a bank balance worth only around $287,000 at the end of June 2024.

If costs were not limited to $80,000, its executive director told the court last week, it would have to drop the case or risk going bust if it loses.

Woodside, which estimates it will spend at least $220,000 defending itself in the case, disagreed, noting that the Federal Court rules that allow a judge to impose a maximum costs order are generally used to ensure a smaller party has access to the courts when they have skin in the game – and shouldn’t be used to “ motivate applicants to challenge any project approval”.

Sadly for Woodside – NOPSEMA sat out of the argument – Justice Shaun McElwaine did not agree, and sent the maximum costs at $80,000, freeing Doctors for the Environment and the EDO to push ahead with their case.

The EDO still has plenty of its own issues. It has until August 2027 to repay or refinance the $6.5m loan from its mystery lender; the Queensland government recently cut funding worth about $500,000 a year to the group; and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is under pressure to do the same with federal funding worth about $2m a year. NE