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The
Guide
Monday August 3, 2009
First published 1831 No. 53,616 $1.40 (inc GST)
PAUL SHEEHAN
DOGS OFF
THE LEASH
Bastards of
the bush
SPORT
OPINION  PAGE 13
SANDILANDS
FINALLY SHUTS UP
RADIO SHOW PULLED
NEWS  PAGE 3
Sex predator tipped off by officials
●
Ex-envoy convicted of child abuse
EXCLUSIVE
Gerard Ryle
and Adrian Lowe
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THE Australian Trade Commission told one of its most senior
diplomats that he was under
police investigation for alleged
child sex offences, allowing the
man to resign quietly and return
home, where he later repeatedly
sexually abused a 15-year-old
Victorian schoolboy.
John Finnin held a top-secret
security clearance from the Federal Government until July 2006,
at a time it was alleged he was
involved in an international
child sex ring. No charges were
laid on this matter.
Austrade was told Finnin was
suspected of using his diplomatic
status and access to Australian
embassies around the world to
traffic in young children for sex.
The Herald understands
Austrade co-operated with an
Australian Federal Police investigation into the matter after the
allegation was first put by the
Dutch and/or German police.
Austrade later took the unusual
step of recalling Finnin from Germany – where he was deputy
consul-general and head of trade
for Europe, the Middle East and
Africa – and informed him that he
was under investigation. Finnin,
who denied the allegations, was
then allowed to leave Austrade
with his reputation intact, quietly
joining the fraudulent fuel technology company Firepower and
returning to Melbourne.
SHOCKING SECRETS
The most harrowing moments
of the trial of John Finnin
(pictured) came when the jury
heard explicit details
from a conversation
allegedly between
a 15-year-old boy
and the former
diplomat.
PAGE 2
On Friday the Victorian County
Court remanded Finnin for
sentencing after he was found
guilty last month of 23 child sex
charges after a trial lasting almost
three weeks.
Seven charges were for entering
into an agreement for the pro-
●
vision of sexual services by a
child; another seven were for
committing an indecent act in the
presence of a child, and another
six were for sexual penetration of
a child. The other charges were
procuring a child for sex, grooming a child for sex and transmitting child pornography.
The court heard that Finnin
paid a Melbourne boy, 15, at least
$100 for sex on seven occasions
and cruised online for sex with
other New Zealand and American children as young as 13.
Much of the evidence brought
against Finnin came from the
federal police, which continued
its investigation after Finnin resigned from Austrade in May
2006. He left his job two months
later after working out his notice.
Key role in Firepower fraud
The Herald understands that
police officers were assigned to a
special task force, with 24-hour
surveillance set up in an empty
unit opposite Finnin’s apartment
in Sandringham, Victoria. At the
time, he drove a Maserati
Quattroporto, a bonus to his
$500,000 annual salary in his new
capacity as chief executive of Firepower.
But Austrade continued to
work with Finnin, entering into a
service agreement with Firepower
and giving the company $394,009
in export grants.
The agreement allowed Finnin
to continue to use Australian embassies and the private residences
of ambassadors to promote the
merits of the company’s supposed fuel-saving devices.
The involvement of Austrade
with Firepower was crucial in
giving the company credibility.
In reality, Firepower was a fraudulent entity that took Australian
investors for an estimated
$100 million.
Firepower made nothing, it
sold nothing, and the Firepower
entity with which Austrade
entered into the service agreement did not even exist. The
name had been made up, but no
one checked.
Furthermore, Firepower was
given a special place on the
Austrade website where it was
promoted as an export success
in Russia. This, too, was a fraud.
Austrade refused to answer
nine questions put by the Herald, including who was in the
room when Finnin was informed
of the police investigation.
Austrade did not deny any of
the allegations, some of which
were referred to in court and
others by Finnin himself in
interviews with the Herald.
Instead it issued a short, general statement defending its
position. ‘‘Austrade demands the
highest standards of legal and
ethical behaviour of its
employees both in Australia and
overseas.
‘‘Any allegations of illegal activity by employees are referred to
relevant authorities. If Austrade
received allegations as asserted,
they would have been referred to
the relevant authority, and any
further comment would be a matter for that authority.’’
INSIDE
Heat rises
on carbon
BHP-Billiton’s plan to dig the
world’s biggest open-cut
uranium and copper mine is
under attack from environmentalists who say it will send
emissions soaring. Meanwhile,
the CSIRO says price caps on
carbon in Labor’s emissions
scheme may hit power supplies.
NEWS, PAGE 5
Tempers flare at
children’s footy
A junior rugby league club
president has been accused of
grabbing a 12-year-old boy by
the throat and crash tackling
him in yet another children’s
game gone wrong. The boy was
allegedly tackled after a brawl
between players on the field.
NEWS, PAGE 3
Uni strike would Tripodi opens door for strip club boss Indian
Criminal paid
by Reserve Bank
hit exam results
A banknote company chaired by
an assistant governor of the
Reserve Bank paid a whitecollar criminal it used as a
lobbyist in Africa tens of
thousands of dollars via an
offshore tax haven account.
NEWS, PAGE 8
Kirsty Needham
Workplace Reporter
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UNIVERSITY lecturers are preparing to take statewide industrial action, including marking
bans that could disrupt students’ exam results.
The action is part of an unprecedented campaign against
heavier workloads and the increasing use of casual staff, which
lecturers say are damaging education quality. Universities said
they expected a national strike.
The state secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union,
Genevieve Kelly, said more than
50 per cent of core teaching in
CLASS ACT
A breakthrough mentoring
scheme for indigenous
students is achieving great
results.
EDUCATION, PAGE 17
universities was done by casuals
and this had had a devastating
effect on students and staff who,
for example, were often unable
to obtain mortgages. ‘‘We want
job security,’’ Ms Kelly said.
On Friday the regulator, Fair
Work Australia, approved a ballot
of staff at the University of NSW,
Wollongong University and the
University of New England by August 27 to determine industrial
action. Ballot applications have
been lodged for the University of
Western Sydney, Charles Sturt
University and Southern Cross.
University of Sydney and
Macquarie University union
members will meet this week.
The union said it was planning
a statewide strike on September
16, and bans on email, processing of exam results and administrative work.
But Ian Argall, the executive
director of the Australian Higher
Education Industrial Association, which represents the
universities, said: ‘‘The NTEU is
gearing up for a national industrial campaign on this issue. We
expect a national strike.’’
Collective agreements at most
universities in NSW have expired
and some negotiations for new
agreements have dragged on for a
year. In some cases universities
and the union have come close
on wage claims of about 4 per
cent. However, Ms Kelly said the
campaign was not about money
but about educational quality, including more academic involvement in decision-making and
better student-to-staff ratios.
An academic at the University
of Western Sydney, Jane Mears,
has a research grant to examine
paid care of the elderly but said
she was worried she would not be
able to complete it within 12
months because of her teaching
load. Associate Professor Mears
said her workload was based on
the number of students she
taught, not the hours. ‘‘The workload I have on paper bears no relationship to the work I do. I love
teaching but the situation has become a nightmare,’’ she said.
Robyn Moroney, the assistant
state secretary of the union, said
the many casual staff she
supervised on multiple campuses
were unable to rely on their income because job security could
disappear with a phone call.
Ms Kelly said: ‘‘The thrust of
the campaign is respect. They
feel they have been treated with
contempt by university management and want to take action not
just for their own sake, but particularly for their students and
quality education.’’
Weekend and night work was
now routine and Ms Kelly said
the biggest concern for lecturers
was the impact their increased
workload had on students.
Mr Argall said: ‘‘Most universities would not accept that if you
don’t have 100 per cent tenure,
you lose quality.’’
He said less research-intensive
universities employed larger
numbers of casual teachers, while
research-focused universities
used fixed-term contracts and
there would be ‘‘universities who
say we don’t want to lose that modality of teaching’’.
warning
on student
attacks
Matt Wade
Herald Correspondent
in New Delhi
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Clockwise from top ... Joe Elias, Joe Tripodi, the West Ryde HQ, and the
Wild Boys Afloat website. Photos: Dallas Kilponen, Andrew Quilty, Dean Sewell
Kate McClymont
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THE owner of a floating male strip
club has won the $15 million to
$20 million tender for a big
maritime development near the
Sydney Fish Markets.
The Ports and Waterways
Minister, Joe Tripodi, said on
Friday that All Occasion Cruises
was the successful tenderer to
build an 18-berth marina for
charter vessels, and a threestorey office building, function
centre and cafe along the
southern side of Blackwattle Bay,
opposite Wentworth Park.
All Occasion Cruises is a $2
company, the sole director of
which is Joe Elias, 42, the
younger brother of the former
footballer Benny Elias.
As well as running a fleet of
party boats on Sydney Harbour,
Mr Elias owns the raunchy Wild
Boys Afloat, which features male
strippers in G-strings performing for hens’ nights and the girlsnight-out market.
Wild Boys Afloat’s main claim
to fame was in 1999 when Brad
Fittler, then captain of the
Sydney Roosters rugby league
team, was left in an incoherent
state outside Glebe police
station after the team had a night
aboard a Wild Boys Afloat boat
alongside a group of women out
on a hens’ night.
Mr Elias’s other investments
include shares in his brother
Benny’s penny dreadful mining
company Chameleon Mining.
Other shareholders include the
football supporter and porn king
Con Ange, who is a friend of the
former Balmain player.
All Occasion Cruises, which
will have a 35-year-lease on the
site, was preferred over seven
other tenderers including the
property developer, Lend Lease.
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According to corporate documents, the headquarters for Mr
Elias’s All Occasion Cruises is a
run-down cottage in Hermitage
Street, West Ryde, bought in
2002 for $350,000 by Mr Elias’s
family company N. & B. Elias
Holdings.
In 2004 Mr Elias’s company
bought vacant land in Liverpool
for $1.5 million from Hiltan, a
company owned by Pat Sergi.
Mr Sergi, who was named in
the Woodward royal commission
as being involved with Robert
Trimbole in the production and
distribution of marijuana, and in
laundering the proceeds, is a
close friend of Mr Tripodi, and
Hiltan has donated to Mr
Tripodi’s election campaigns.
Mr Sergi and Mr Tripodi were
shareholders in Westside
Property Developments, which
bought and sold government
land, including Department of
Housing property, while Mr
Tripodi was an MP.
Mr Elias was overseas and not
available for comment on his
company’s successful tender.
Kym Lennox, the principal
consultant to The Tipping Point
Institute based in Hong Kong,
said Mr Elias had hired his firm
to prepare the documents for the
tender. He said the cost of
tendering had been a six-figure
sum and Mr Elias had succeeded
because as a charter-boat
operator he understood the
requirements.
A spokesman for Mr Tripodi
said it was ‘‘a very competitive
process’’ for the Blackwattle Bay
precinct and All Occasion
Cruises had been chosen because it met the requirements.
He could not disclose the names
of other tenderers but said the
process had been overseen by
independent probity auditors.
THE Indian student crisis will
die down only when attacks on
students stop or become so rare
that no one can argue there is a
pattern of anti-Indian violence
in Australia, according to the
Indian Minister for External
Affairs, Shashi Tharoor.
In the first one-on-one interview about the controversy given
by an Indian minister to the Australian media, Dr Tharoor told
the Herald his Government had
no interest in allowing the crisis
to “infect” relations between the
countries.
But he made it clear India was
still concerned about the safety
of its students in Australia.
“There is only one meaningful
yardstick and that is that if these
attacks cease, or become so infrequent that no one . . . can
claim there is a continuing pattern of anti-Indian violence,” he
said. “It’s not yet clear that we
have reached that point but I
hope we are getting there.”
The repetitiveness of the
attacks has given the issue “critical mass” in India. He called for
“action that calms this down so
that it ceases to be as loud a political issue in India as it has become.
If there were maybe one incident
a year there may be a brief headline and it will die,” he said.
The Indian media claims there
have been at least 20 incidents
since May.
Dr Tharoor said his Government’s efforts to cool the situation had been undermined by
the frequency of reported
attacks. “For some weeks now we
have been urging people to cool
down a little bit but the fact is
that every time there is an incident it’s a setback for our efforts
to cool the temperature on this.
‘‘We are very pleased that the
Australian Government is taking
the issue very seriously and
taking various actions. We are
Continued Page 2
Mass trial for
Iran dissidents
A mass trial against more than
100 reformists has opened in
Iran, accusing them of
conspiring with foreign powers
to stage a revolution through
terrorism, subversion and a
media campaign to discredit last
month’s presidential election.
The trial comes just days before
the President, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, is to be sworn in.
WORLD, PAGE 9
Hardie bosses
face costs battle
A fight among 10 former James
Hardie directors and executives
over liability to meet tens of
millions of dollars in legal bills
has been foreshadowed in
submissions to the NSW
Supreme Court.
BUSINESSDAY, PAGE 21
SYDNEY CITY fine, partly cloudy 8°-19°
TOMORROW: fine, partly cloudy 9-19°
LIVERPOOL fine, partly cloudy 3°-20°
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PENRITH fine, partly cloudy 4°-20°
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DETAILS PAGE 18
ISSN 0312-6315
9 770312 631018
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