By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of colourful Sydney criminal lawyer Ahmed Dib, a descriptor that is almost a professional requirement for anyone hoping to represent the best and brightest of the city’s underworld.
A semi-professional boxer, whose ringside life helped introduce him to a client list of bikie types, Dib is “a fighter in and out of the courtroom”, according to his official work bio, which also reminds prospective clients that he’s undefeated in 20 bouts.
Lawyer Ahmed Dib received a slap on the wrist from the law society.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
Dib last graced these pages when he bought a $1.7 million property outside of Mudgee, which he then rented to family member Yasser Nour, who then turned it into a private rehabilitation centre for men accused of serious crimes, to the chagrin of locals. Dib had nothing to do with the centre itself.
Now, Dib has landed in a bit of hot water with the Office of the Legal Services Commissioner, who found him to have engaged in unsatisfactory professional conduct after he failed to comply with court orders requiring him to file an affidavit and failed to ensure other solicitors at his practice complied with those orders.
A fairly trivial foible, which landed Dib with a fairly trivial punishment – a $3000 fine, a reprimand from the OLSC, and a promise to undertake further ethics training. Dib didn’t respond to CBD’s queries about the matter.
In happier news, Ahmed has picked up a new employee, an equally colourful character by the name of Steve “Mav” Mavrigiannakis, popping up in court of late on behalf of his firm, Dib & Associates.
In 2017, Mavrigiannakis was accused of rorting thousands from the Gumala Aboriginal Corporation, one of the country’s biggest Indigenous companies in the country, during his time as chief executive, taking home nearly $400,000 a year.
Mav faced the Federal Court and denied liability, with the matter settling in 2018 without a conviction. But he’s perhaps better known for being a perennial political aspirant who has run and lost in eight different elections at a state, federal and local election since 1998.
Most recently, Mav was an unsuccessful senate candidate for Tasmania with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation at the 2022 poll. He subsequently announced to the “Mavvies,” as he called followers on a Facebook page where he regularly posted memes criticising communists, paedophiles and the United Nations, that he’d be permanently retiring from politics.
But a year later, as dysfunction gripped One Nation, he was appointed the party’s treasurer in NSW, in an overhaul that eventually led to a bitter separation between Hanson and Mark Latham, who ultimately quit the party.
Wherever you go these days, the former Labor leader is never far from the action.
Blaze up
We’re hardly experts, but we reckon this is the first time voters will receive election campaign literature featuring a picture of Ned Kelly smoking two blunts.
The Legalise Cannabis Party’s 2025 Senate how-to-vote card.
But that how-to-vote card is part of the Legalise Cannabis Party’s plan to build on some recent state-level success and win its first federal seat. The party is running for the upper house in every state and putting up candidates in a slew of key marginals.
Its best shot is in Victoria, where former state upper house MP Fiona Patten, of the Australian Sex Party (later renamed the Australian Reason Party), is the weedheads’ lead candidate.
Patten lost her upper house seat in 2022 after eight years on the crossbench, telling this masthead at the time that she was leaving behind “unfinished business”.
The party has also been given a further boost by Labor preferencing them number two on their Senate how-to-votes in the state, above the Greens.
While legal weed still feels like a pipe dream in Australia, the party has experienced a steady resurgence of late, with former Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham winning an upper house seat at the 2023 NSW state election following a strong showing in WA two years earlier.
Here to help
Donald Trump hadn’t even claimed victory over Kamala Harris in last November’s presidential election when the calls to send ambassador Kevin Rudd back to Queensland began. But the Ruddster has hung on.
The former prime minister, whose position in Washington, DC, came under intense scrutiny as his past scathing attacks on the US president resurfaced, spent the night after Trump’s win dining with a Republican representative from Illinois, identity redacted, according to documents released under freedom of information.
Kevin 07’s diary, which was released this week, shows a series of meetings with redacted friends on polling day, culminating in an election-night reception hosted by the embassy.
Later that week, Rudd dropped into a talk by Australian National University professor John Blaxland to graduate students at Harvard Kennedy School (officially, the John F. Kennedy School of Government).
“Ambassador Rudd is a highly effective ambassador to the United States. Representing Australia’s interests through engagements with a range of stakeholders is a core part of diplomacy,” a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson told us.
To be fair, Kevin from Queensland remains in DC, watching the world burn from a ringside seat.
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