Troy Pannell allegations would be keeping AFL officials up at night

AFL umpire Troy Pannell was reportedly rushed to the Alfred Hospital for surgery following a car crash just hours after failing to appear in court as the key suspect in an embezzlement case.

• Missing umpire a no show in court

AFL umpire Troy Pannell was reportedly in a serious condition in The Alfred hospital on Friday night after a single vehicle crash on a Victorian country road.

It’s understood Pannell’s car ran off the road in rural western Victoria on Friday and hit a tree, with no other vehicle nearby at the time.

He was rushed to Melbourne for life saving surgery just hours after failing to appear in the Supreme Court as the key suspect in a massive embezzlement case.

Sources said it was believed Pannell had been lying low in South Australia after first failing to appear in court on May 9.

A warrant for his arrest was issued on May 20 but he was not apprehended, though it is understood South Australian police thought they knew where he was.

There have been widespread rumours this week that Pannell was hiding out in disguise and running scared.

The man who umpired 219 AFL games from 2005 to 2018 was a controversial figure after a game at Docklands in 2016 when he awarded 17 free kicks to the Bulldogs and only one to the Adelaide Crows.

Earlier, if anyone knew Troy Pannell’s whereabouts, they certainly weren’t saying.

Pannell’s mother didn’t even know where the former elite AFL umpire had gone.

This is not surprising, as he told his boss she was dead.

News of her death came as a surprise to Mrs Pannell when the Herald Sun contacted her this week at her home near Werribee, where Troy and his sister grew up.

Troy Pannell umpiring a game between Richmond and Western Bulldogs in 2018. Picture: Getty

Few things about Pannell are certain but this is: he is a prolific and polished liar. Unravel his movements over the years and his propensity for telling porkies stands out.

This insight might have come too late for his former employer, SeaRoad Shipping, which discovered an $8.7 million black hole. It prompted the Supreme Court action in which Pannell was central, until he vanished in early May.

After muddying his trail with an unlikely story about missing court on May 9 because he’d hit a kangaroo in his car.

How did the AFL come to recruit such an apparently flawed personality to its elite umpiring ranks? The answer, according to western suburbs football sources, is that the big league ignored specific advice not to.

The young Pannell was a promising umpire in the Western Region Football League but disgraced himself with a disgusting “prank”, defecating in another umpire’s bed.

Pannell was dropped for the following season and the western league warned the AFL against elevating him. But he sidestepped the ban and further scrutiny by heading interstate for the 2004 season and umpiring in a NSW competition.

By the time he returned in early 2005, the scandal had subsided and the AFL signed him. He made his debut in the big time in 2005 and umpired 219 games at the top level by 2018.

He stared down the fact that Crows fans cried foul in the 2016 season over a crucial Docklands game in which he awarded the Bulldogs 17 free kicks to just one for the Crows.

The Bulldogs’ narrow win, cemented in the dying minutes, propelled them towards the finals and the Cinderella story of the decade. They won the flag for the first time since the club’s lone premiership in 1954.

Angry Crows fans set up a facebook page tagged “Troy Pannell is a flog” and he was savagely criticised. Crows fans swore that with a level playing field, a win against the Bulldogs in that round would have put the Crows into finals contention.

Adelaide captain Taylor Walker talks to Pannell at three quarter time of the game in which he awarded the Bulldogs 17 free kicks and the Crows one. Picture: Wayne Ludbey

At the time, even rabid Adelaide fans didn’t speculate it was more than partisan umpiring from a dyed-in-the-wool western suburbs “white maggot”. But the damning allegations levelled last year that Pannell had systematically defrauded SeaRoad of millions of dollars pushes him into another level of suspicion altogether.

Was he illegally gambling on match results? An even more sinister question for the AFL’s integrity department is this: could a bent umpire be lured into fixing matches for criminal betting syndicates?

That thought must be keeping league officials awake at night.

The fact that Pannell bought a big house at Gisborne exactly 60 days after that strange Docklands game might well be coincidence but it’s another intriguing footnote to a strange story.

So is the fact he was co-owner of a Seddon cafe and a big commercial property in Kyneton, Duck Duck Goose and Larder. Over time, he also bought all or part of at least nine racehorses in New Zealand with a view to racing the best of them in Victoria.

Pannell’s buying of real estate and racehorses makes it sound as if he has been throwing cash around with both hands. But that isn’t quite accurate, either.

As far as anyone can see, the alleged “$9 million man” hasn’t spent anything like that amount on visible assets and possessions.

The Gisborne house is good but it cost $810,000. None of the horses Pannell bought in New Zealand cost a fortune, with the best of them a $10,000 bargain as a yearling in 2018.

It’s true he paid up to $10,000 a month in training fees until the embezzlement allegations were levelled against him last year, but he had already stopped paying and still owes boutique Kiwi trainers Vaughan and Trudy Keegan around $30,000.

Pannell is interviewed in 2019 on a horse he purchased in NZ that went on to win a race at Yarra Valley. Picture: Racing.com

It’s a similar story with well-liked Kyneton trainer Charles Cassar, who trained a handful of horses for Pannell over several years.

When Pannell’s bubble burst last winter, the mystified Cassar was also left with some hefty unpaid bills. Yet neither he nor the Kiwi connections saw Pannell as an especially big spender, let alone a reckless gambler.

None of Pannell’s horses had cost a lot and when he brought a handful to Victoria, he raced them in partnership with other people, sharing training costs at “battler” levels.

The best of his horses was the $10,000 filly he named Aimee’s Jewel. Trained and part-owned by the Keegans, she won her first two starts impressively and a Group 3 race at her fifth start in New Zealand before running in a Group 1 race.

The first time Aimee’s Jewel galloped on the track at Kyneton for her new stable, she was making the raspy roaring noise that usually demands urgent throat surgery or retirement — and often both.

Pannell did one showy and extravagant thing, flying top Kiwi jockey Lisa Allpress to Melbourne to ride Aimee’s Jewel at her first Australian start, at Sandown in May 2021.

Allpress later told friends that the oddball Aussie owner had surprised her by sending a limousine to take her to and from her hotel. It didn’t help. The mare ran last. She would subsequently have surgery and a long spell but never did better than a third placing in Australia.

Pannell hung onto Aimee’s Jewel for another two years and bred a foal from her (at an estimated cost of more than $30,000) but when facing the prospect of court proceedings late last year he sold the mare for $50,000.

The foal was sold at auction for $150,000 early this year (through a third party) to leading trainer Ciaron Maher and others. What Pannell got from the deal is unclear.

The now-closed Seddon cafe co-owned by former AFL umpire Troy Pannell. Picture: Josephine Quattrocchi.

The truth is that signs of the man spending money as if he stole it are hard to find. It is almost conceivable that the properties he bought could have been with loans serviced by an average six-figure salary effectively doubled by his regular umpiring pay over 13 years.

Even if a couple of SeaRoad’s missing millions can be identified, where’s the rest?

At the time of writing, the umpire is alleged (but not proven) to be an embezzler.

It’s fair to say that embezzlers are often addicted to some form of gambling — if not poker machines or casino games then punting on racehorses. Sometimes all three, with a drug habit thrown in.

But if Troy Pannell is a victim of the punt, it’s a well-kept secret. No one in racing’s tight-knit betting scene has heard of him.

Sources familiar with the client lists of leading corporate bookmakers say he is unknown. Two of Victoria’s biggest race day bookies are unaware of him and are confident they would hear if he bet big, even if he were doing it at arm’s length through a third-party “bowler”.

The trainers that he owes money never saw him as a big punter or even a regular one. In New Zealand, Vaughan Keegan recalls that when the stable set Pannell’s filly Aimee’s Jewel to win her first start at Awapuni, the Australian coupled her with other horses in a multi-leg bet that (he later claimed) turned $6500 into more than $80,000.

On that occasion, he “slung” the trainers a gift for their part in setting up the betting coup, but never did again. In Victoria, people who saw Pannell on course when his horses raced were sure he didn’t win enough “even to sling the jockey”.

Like a lot of small-time owners, he implied he bet in thousands but in fact mostly had modest bets. Only once did he put enough on a horse to move the odds from $9 to $3.50 — and that wouldn’t take much in the tiny betting pool at Ararat.

The AFL ignored warnings from Western Region Football League when it promoted Pannell to its elite ranks. Picture: Michael Klein

Whatever the umpire’s vices were, if he had any, it wasn’t buying expensive horses or betting big on them. And it wasn’t buying cars.

“The only time I saw him he was driving second-hand cars — an old Subaru or a Toyota RAV4,” recalls one racetrack regular.

He left the impression he was more interested in visiting women than horses. “Dropping in at the stables” was a convenient excuse, according to one observer of the man branded a “liar and a cheat” by his ex-wife, Lynise Woodgate.

The single mother’s blunt language can be excused because she was unhappy to find out that her elusive and evasive husband had fathered a baby on the side with a woman in Ascot Vale and was a regular user of dating apps to cheat on both his wife and mistress.

An alert Kyneton resident noticed something else about Pannell.

He would sometimes be visited at the Kyneton eatery by a man or men who clearly weren’t local nor passing motorists.

They would have short, sharp conversations then leave.

Originally published as Troy Pannell allegations would be keeping AFL officials up at night