Case against Eddie Obeid’s son ‘impaired by ICAC’

The conspiracy case against Moses Obeid is being driven by the flawed findings of a NSW anti-corruption probe, his trial heard.

Former NSW Labor minister Eddie Obeid. Picture: AAP

The crown’s “half-baked” conspiracy case against Moses Obeid, son of disgraced former NSW Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid, is a “reconstructed fiction” being driven by the flawed findings of a NSW anti-corruption probe, his trial has been told.

Moses Obeid, his 76-year-old father and former resources minister Ian Macdonald, 70, have pleaded not guilty to conspiring together between September 2007 and January 2009 over the granting of a lucrative coal exploration licence on farm land owned by the Obeid family at Mount Penny in the Bylong Valley near Mudgee in NSW.

“The case does not come within a bull’s roar of beyond reasonable doubt,” Moses Obeid’s barrister, Maurice Neil QC, told the NSW Supreme Court in his opening address on Tuesday. “It is all reconstruction. It is fantasy. It is fiction. The whole crown case is reconstructed fiction.”

Mr Neil added that the prosecution’s “circumstantial” case had been clouded by an Independent Commission Against Corruption hearing investigating corruption in the former NSW Labor government that had warped the perception of a “normal commercial activity”.

“The crown’s case is impaired by ICAC (and) is a total ICAC-induced reconstruction,” he said.

“The ICAC lenses or glasses see things gloomily and dark.”

Former NSW premier Morris Iemma is expected to be the first witness for the prosecution on Wednesday when the judge-alone trial before judge Elizabeth Fullerton continues.