Clive Palmer OK with court’s ruling to allow fraud action

CLIVE Palmer has played down a Queensland court decision rejecting his bid to have a $12m fraud lawsuit against him dropped.

CLIVE Palmer has played down a Queensland court decision rejecting his bid to have a $12 million fraud lawsuit against him dropped, declaring the ruling “OK”.

The Palmer United Party leader yesterday acknowledged he had set a “very high bar” in trying to strike out Citic Pacific’s alle­gations against him, but said: “These things are so outrageous we thought we’d do that anyway.”

Queensland Supreme Court judge David Jackson ruled on Monday that legal action brought by the Chinese state-owned company was not improper and there was “nothing fictitious” in the ­evidence.

Citic is suing Mr Palmer over the alleged dishonest payments of $10m in Chinese funds to Cosmo Developments, a company associated with the politician, and more than $2 million to Media Circus Network, an advertising company, in the lead-up to his federal election campaign.

“The judge didn’t find against us on any of those things, he just said on an interlocutory basis he couldn’t make that finding because interlocutory basis is only when you have a virtually very scant bit of information,” Mr Palmer said. “So that’s OK.

“Of course there was no finding against us for any wrongdoing and it was our action that we took against them, so that’s OK.”

It is likely Mr Palmer’s lawyers will need to produce documen­tation revealing his “state of mind” at the time of payment, but Mr Palmer assured reporters he was “cool, calm and collected”.