Tragedy of errors proves SA ICAC flaws

Claims that anti-corruption commissions operate as unaccountable star chambers have been strengthened following the John Hanlon case in South Australia.

Former Renewal SA boss John Hanlon. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

Claims that anti-corruption commissions operate as unaccountable star chambers have been strengthened following a case in South Australia where an honest and law-abiding chief executive was hounded for four years ­despite doing nothing wrong.

SA taxpayers now face a vast compensation bill after Renewal SA chief executive John Hanlon lost his $400,000-plus job and was dragged through the courts based on evidence that had been improperly collected.

Worse, SA’s Independent Commission Against Corruption stands accused of discovering evidence three years ago which proved Mr Hanlon was innocent – but proceeded with the trial twice, only to abandon the prosecution this week.

Speaking exclusively with The Weekend Australian, Mr Hanlon and his wife Jenny said they were still unable to process what happened over the past four years, with their home being raided and even their daughter having her laptop seized while she was preparing for university exams.

Mr Hanlon was a highly ­regarded public servant with a blemish-free record and a reputation across politics for hard work, but since 2018 has had what he calls “a black cloud” hanging over his name.

“The question I have is why did this happen to me, and who else could it happen to,” he said. “Without Jen being by my side I don’t think I’d be here today. With everything hanging over my head I just became a recluse, I did not want to see anyone.

“The hardest thing to process is that none of it needed to happen because none of it was true.”

The case is a massive embarrassment for SA ICAC which has now been hit with a please explain letter from Attorney-General Kyam Maher. And ICAC commissioner Anne Vanstone cut short her holidays and returned to work on Thursday vowing to help with any investigation.

Some MPs are going further, with SA Best MLC Frank Pangallo demanding a royal commission into ICAC and saying current managers should be held to ­account and even sacked.

At worst, the allegations against Mr Hanlon were so trifling that even if they had been proven, would have involved the misuse of $15,000 in public money by wrongly taking his wife and daughter with him on a work trip to Germany.

But Mr Hanlon had paid out of his own pocket for his family to travel and insisted that when he was accused of spending time with his wife and daughter, he was actually holding meetings with six German agencies related to his work at SA’s peak planning and development agency.

Not only did ICAC investigators break international law by travelling to Germany and interviewing people without permission, they discovered through phone surveillance that Mr Hanlon’s phone signals did indeed place him at the different agencies he insisted he had visited.

Also, the phone signals for his wife and daughter showed that they were in a different part of Germany while Mr Hanlon was properly doing his job.

The allegations against him, which emanated from a handful of disgruntled staff who had been rightly disciplined for seriously bullying a colleague, could not be substantiated and the DPP finally dropped the case this week.

But in the lead-up to the trial, ICAC documents were released in open court which show aspects of the investigation were amateurish, while others were clouded in mystery. They reveal that at one stage ICAC placed Mr Hanlon under surveillance after a ­Renewal SA employee suspected he was having dinner in the Barossa Valley at public expense with someone he was thought to have described as “my niece”.

Mr Hanlon had not said “my niece” but “Monish” in reference Mr Monish Bhindi, the head of the Urban Development Institute of Australia, and their Barossa dinner was wholly work-related.

Court documents also show that ICAC had drawn up a spreadsheet of all the visits he made to different locations during his trip to Germany, citing the times and dates. However, a complete version of that spreadsheet was revealed to the court which contained a missing column which located Mr Hanlon’s phone at the locations where he rightly insisted he was working.

Another document shows that an ICAC investigator who travelled to Germany to investigate Mr Hanlon actually did no work for a two-day period but billed the taxpayers for meals and accommodation on those days.

MPs across the political divide in SA are hailing this botched case as a further vindication of their unanimous decision last year to clip ICAC’s wings. All 69 state MPs voted in favour of reforms that more narrowly define the powers of the ICAC, provide a more robust exoneration process for public officers investigated on the basis of false or flawed claims, and give access to legal aid for those under investigation.