It’s nice that Christian Porter, the former Canberra staff snogger, is attracting work since his ignominious slide from PM-in-Waiting to junior counsel at the criminal bar working out of Perth’s Geoffrey Miller Chambers.
Three of his cases have been in the news this month: Oleg Deripaska v Minister for Foreign Affairs; a WA Corruption and Crime Commission inquiry into the State’s Ombudsman, Christopher Field; and defence of a farmer charged with damaging a secret Aboriginal site.
≈ ≈ ≈
Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska is a Russian billionaire, within Putin’s circle of kleptocrats.
He was sanctioned by the United States in response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea. The US Treasury said Deripaska “had been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official, and taking part in extortion and racketeering”.
In 2022 the British government sanctioned him over the attack on Ukraine and Australia imposed financial sanctions and travel bans under the Autonomous Sanctions Act in March of that year.
Earlier, in 2006, the US cancelled his entry visa because of links to organised crime and concerns that he could launder money through American real estate.
He hired Rev Porter, alongside Brother Scott’s former office lawyer Daniel Ward, to challenge the decision by then Foreign Minister, Marise Payne.
They sought judicial review and advanced various constitutional grounds – all sunk like a stone.
Because the sanctions prevent the supply of goods and services, i.e. accessing legal services, Oleg’s team came up with the submission that this was inconsistent with common law principles and infringed the implied freedom of political communication (Lange).
The Very Rev had long railed against the Lange decision – cooked-up by leftie activist judges – and here he was pleading it.
Oleg happened to have a 20 percent interest in Queensland Alumina Ltd, controlled by Rio Tinto, so the sanctions and travel ban came as an unpleasant encumbrance. At one stage he had a controlling interest in United Company Rusal, the world’s second largest aluminium company.
Rio promptly stopped the supply of bauxite to Rusal and refused to let the Russians take shipments of alumina from the Queensland refinery. This was unsuccessfully challenged in the Federal Court.
≈ ≈ ≈
Oleg: sanctioned
Deripaska’s backstory is worth an excursion.
The Russian goes to the heart of Trumpian politics in the US with connections to Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016.
Manafort had been a lobbyist for the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who was linked to organised crime and whose election was widely regarded as a fraud – Putin congratulated him on his “victory” before the results were officially known.
Apart from paying enormous fees to Manafort, Yanukovych also gave the lobbyist $US30,000 worth of the best caviar.
Another of his clients was Deripaska, who wanted to ensure Ukraine stayed within Russia’s orbit and at the same time ingratiate himself with Putin.
American political historian Heather Cox Richardson in her Letters from an American last week reflected on what was happening in Ukraine 10 years ago, when Yanukovych fled to Russia after massacring scores of pro-democracy protestors during the Maidan Revolution.
Manafort: on his way to pokeyManafort continued to work for Deripaska while head of Trump’s presidential campaign, in the process borrowing large amounts of money from him. He still owes the oligarch about $US17 million.
Konstantin Viktorovich Kilimnik, who ran the Kyiv office of Manafort’s consulting shop, is described by US agencies as a “Russian intelligence officer”.
According to The New York Time’s Jim Rutenberg, Manafort’s Russian clients hired him in 2016 to push a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic of Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland”.
The new republic’s president would be Viktor Yanukovych.
Following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the US and the EU imposed sanctions on Russia, specific businesses and oligarchs.
In return for hacking, misinformation, and interference to help Trump win the 2016 US election, Manafort lobbied on behalf of his clients to lift the expanding array of sanctions that had been imposed by the Obama administration.
In July 2018, President Trump started to make accommodating noises about the annexation and lifting sanctions.
The other unforgettable wrinkle was that the Russians hacked Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails, at the invitation of Trump – later to be published by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks.
Australian High Commissioner Fishnets Downer was tipped off about the Clinton “dirt file” by one of Trump’s campaign operatives, in a London wine bar – a tête-à-tête that sparked the Mueller investigation into Trump and Russia’s role in the 2016 election.
Manafort was found guilty in 2019 of tax evasion, bank fraud, hiding foreign bank accounts, witness tampering, money laundering and making false statements to investigators.
In 2020 Trump pardoned him and unwound most of his forfeitures.
Deripaska v Minister for Foreign Affairs
Field work
Rev. Porter has also saddled up for Christopher Field, WA’s Ombudsman, who is caught-up in a corruption commission investigation.
It is alleged that Field managed to spend only 35 days in the office over 13 months.
At first he said he would be surprised if that was correct, but records of his swipe card from January 2023 to January 2024 left him high and dry.
The gallivanting Ombudsman and his lawyer
Instead of being in the office, Field was in Morocco, Pakistan, Slovenia, the UK, Thailand, Taiwan, Italy and Bahrain, doing the hard yards as president of the International Ombudsman Institute.
In March 2022 he was appointed to his fourth five-year term as WA’s Ombudsman – and is now the longest serving ombudsman in Australia.
The CCC inquiry is delving into Field’s travel expenses and a strange agreement with Morrison-era political backstabber and now secretary general of the OECD, Mathias Cormann.
According to a report from the ABC Field agreed to pay the OECD $213,000 of WA taxpayers money for a “research project” into “the role of Ombudsman institutions in building a culture of open government for stronger and more resilient communities”.
When asked by the WA Premier’s office for details, the project became even more nebulous. It would have a target audience of “our major trading partners … [with] a particular focus on engagement with Aboriginal Western Australians, refugee communities and other diaspora communities as well as the emerging digital sphere”.
In other words, a waste of taxpayers’ money.
Field disputes the claim of WA Treasurer, Rita Saffioti, that the Ombudsman had no authority to pay Cormann and the OECD the equivalent of €130,000 for such a pie-in-the-sky project.
He said he would wait until the CCC delivers its findings before he sent the money to Mathias, “out of respect”.
The show resumes before Commissioner John McKechnie in March, after the Ombudsman’s trip to Uzbekistan.
Dream time
Maddox and his crossing
Last week (Friday, Feb 23) Porter unsuccessfully sought to have a prosecution under the WA Aboriginal Heritage Act thrown out.
His client Tony Maddox has been charged with damaging a sacred site on land east of Perth.
The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage told the Perth Magistrates Court that Maddox did not have permission to alter the course of a waterway on the property.
Traditional custodian Rod Garlett told Madge Andrew Matthews that the reconfigured waterway could disturb the Wagyl, the Rainbow Serpent, which could curse the local Aboriginal people and lead to sickness and possibly death.
“It’s about life, it’s about mother earth. It’s about a living, breathing entity that we live on today.”
According to a report by the ABC a woman in the public gallery muttered “rubbish”.
Maddox told the court that “never in [his] entire life” had he heard of the Aboriginal Heritage Act. He said that if the site is important to Aboriginal people then it should be on the land title.
The prosecutor said the construction of a crossing over a tributary of the Avon River and pumping large amounts of bore water into it has created a large artificial lake.
Maddox maintained that he had created a sanctuary for birds, turtles, fish, frogs, ducks and even a kangaroo.
Porter said the maps are wrong and that the database of heritage sites could not be relied on to establish a breach of the Act.
On it goes from March 6.
≈ ≈ ≈
For Porter this bundle of briefs makes a refreshing change from his time at the DPP’s office prosecuting $50 Kmart shoplifters.