Greens leaders Adam Bandt and Bob Brown in bizarre identity theft

Adam Bandt wants to set the record straight: he has not been moonlighting as the boss of a sinister Paris-based ‘human rights’ group with organised crime links.

Greens leader Adam Bandt, right, and a screenshot from the CIPDH website showing a photo of him, centre, as ‘Waclaw Kozakiewicz’. The site also uses an image of former Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, top left, as ‘Robert Comune’ and former Greens leader Bob Brown as ‘Zbishik Pakolov’.

Greens leader Adam Bandt would like to set the record straight: he has not been moonlighting as the boss of a sinister Paris-based “human rights” organisation with links to Eastern European organised crime figures.

Yes, that’s his picture on their website but he’s not leading a double life as Waclaw Kozakiewicz from Poland.

Until last week, he’d never heard of the Comite International pour la Protection des Droits de l’Homme (CIPDH), the mysterious consortium that claims he and other Greens figures as high-ranking officials.

“This is up there for the weirdest thing that’s happened in my time in public life, and you can’t help but be uneasy about it,” Mr Bandt said.

The Greens leader has a right to be concerned. The CIPDH has been linked to international crimes ranging from the theft of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s missing fortune to providing cover for Kremlin-backed separatist armies.

Former Greens senator Scott Ludlam also gets a guernsey in the fake humanitarian outfit, as Robert Comune, supposedly a vice-president of the CIPDH, and former party leader Bob Brown is Zbishik Pakolov, another vice-president.

The CIPDH, which also calls itself the International Human Rights Defence Committee, claims to be a UN aid organisation but the UN rejects any connection with the group and says it has launched an investigation.

The CIPDH issues its own “diplomatic” passports and UN-like licence plates to members, some of whom dress in blue and gold military-style uniforms that would not look out of place in a Borat movie, usually posing for staged photo ops handing out food parcels.

A CIPDH official purportedly handing out donations in Kazakhstan. Picture: Facebook

The bizarre saga has been unravelled by Australian researcher Elise Thomas, who works with the Bellingcat investigative group.

Ms Thomas was conducting ­research on Russian political lobbyist Alexander Ionov, who campaigned for the release of Russian spy Maria Butina, arrested in the US in 2018. In the course of her investigation, she stumbled upon the CIPDH website that listed Ionov as a vice-president.

“I was scrolling down this page and suddenly found myself staring at Scott Ludlam. I did several double takes …and then I scrolled down a bit further and I saw Bob Brown and Adam Bandt, and yes, that was definitely them.”

Intrigued, Ms Thomas went on to discover 16 of the profiles on the team page were fakes, including a photo of “chief legal officer Anna Bozin” but actually of American singer-songwriter Lia Ices.

Screenshot from the CIPDH website purportedly of vice-president 'Anna Bozin'. The photograph actually shows singer-songwriter Lia Ices.

When Ms Thomas contacted CIPDH to ask about the stolen photos, they claimed to be shocked, saying they were “unaware, for over a decade, that 16 members of their leadership team including two vice-­presidents and the chief legal officer did not exist”.

Further digging by Ms Thomas uncovered a web of individuals with military ties and criminal records. The group’s “representative to Crimea”, Viktor Litvinov, led a pro-Moscow militia that participated in Russia’s military annexation of the peninsula in 2014.

President Vladimir Putin awarded the CIPDH’s secretary-general, Iskander Ioussoupov, with the Order For Merit to the Fatherland. Another member, Dimitris Siokis, who says he is a colonel in the Russia Cossack Army, provides “anti-terrorist” training in Xinjiang, where Chinese authorities have been engaged in human rights abuses against the Uighurs.

The CIPDH first surfaced in 2011 during the search for billions of dollars in cash spirited out of Libya after the fall of Gaddafi.

A panel of experts on Libya ­established by the UN to track the movement of cash and assets out of Libya reported that locked boxes containing the loot were stored in CIPDH’s premises in Accra, Ghana, marked with the logo of the International Committee of the Red Cross to avoid suspicion. The Ghanaian government declined to assist the investigation.

Boxes alleged to contain cash and other assets of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi — marked with the logo of the International Committee of the Red Cross — in CIPDH's office in Accra, Ghana

Organised crime experts believe the group provides cover for a collection of disparate underworld figures to operate under a quasi-humanitarian cover.

The organisation has an address on Rue du Dr Finlay, near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, although the phone number appeared to have been disconnected when The Australian rang.

Ms Thomas would like to see a wider investigation of the organisation. “Whatever the truth, CIPDH has been able to appropriate the identities of unwitting individuals and (had) some of its members accused of serious crimes. That, at the very least, ­raises questions about what the group really is,” she said.

As for Mr Bandt, he’s trying to take the theft of his identity in good humour, but the whole affair is unsettling. “Seeing a shadowy organisation misappropriate my identity makes me deeply uncomfortable,” he says.