December 24 is the date of some of city’s most memorable scandals

Meanwhile, a panic-stricken Stylianou was overheard by the police on the phone to Vincent at Lady Jane’s, informing him of the three-letter debacle which could bring them all undone.

Any residual Christmas cheer among J. P. Morgan staff swiftly evaporated when they returned to work on Monday, December 29. There was the fax from Laiki Bank querying the multimillion-dollar deposit into Stylianou’s account. To their horror, bank staff discovered that account 28966, containing super funds for federal public servants, had $150 million missing.

After a two-year investigation, in August 2005, the federal police swooped. But for the three-letter slip-up, they may have got away with it.

‘You’d think they’d won Lotto’

It was just after 11pm on December 24, 1993, when a blaze broke out at a modest printing plant in Silverwater in Sydney’s west.

The mere name of the printing company – Offset Alpine – would later become inextricably linked with scandal after scandal. Firstly, it was revealed that the company had hit the jackpot, having just taken out a $53 million insurance policy for the replacement of the old printing presses, which were destroyed in the fire.

Offset Alpine was later linked to a murder and mysterious Swiss bank accounts and would ruin the reputations of several high-profile figures, including the late trio of powerbroker Graham Richardson, crooked stockbroker Rene Rivkin, and media consigliere Trevor Kennedy.

On the night of the fire, there was jubilation across the Parramatta River in the Hunters Hill mansion of corrupt state Labor MP Eddie Obeid.

Obeid’s son Paul, 25, was playing poker with two of his brothers and a group of mates when he received a call about the huge blaze at his company Offset Alpine’s printing presses at Silverwater.

One of the other poker players recalled his astonishment at the reaction of the Obeid boys. “You’d think they’d won Lotto,” he said.

In many ways, they had. News of the insurance windfall sent the share price skyrocketing.

In 1992, Obeid, who owned Arabic paper El Telegraph, had been offered media mogul Kerry Packer’s redundant printing press. The offer had come via Obeid’s patron, then-federal Labor frontbencher Graham Richardson, who enjoyed such close connections to Packer that as communications minister he was known as “Minister for Channel Nine”.

The Herald’s late political commentator Alan Ramsey once offered the brutal assessment of Richardson’s role, installing “some of the more depressing political spivs and nonentities” into “various levels of well-paid government office over the years”.

‘Out of the horse’s mouth’

One of those was Obeid, who has twice been jailed for misconduct in public office. Several Labor figures were adamant that Obeid paid Richardson for getting him a seat in the NSW upper house in 1991. One said the $80,000 figure “is out of the horse’s mouth”, referring to Richardson.

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With Obeid unable to stump up the $15 million purchase price, Richo’s other good mate, Rivkin, bought the printing company, with Obeid retaining a 25 per cent stake plus a secret payment of $50,000 per year for his advice. His son, Paul, was installed as a director.

At the time of the fire, Richardson’s own political career was hurtling towards annihilation. In 1992, Richo had to step aside from his ministry after he was accused of using his position to help a relative who was facing jail in the Marshall Islands over a migration scam.

At the time of the fire, Richo had clawed his way back into favour, although then-prime minister Paul Keating had given him the health rather than the communications portfolio.

So when Richo inexplicably resigned from the federal parliament in March 1994, citing that at the age of 44, he had health issues and was looking for a refresh, his announcement was met with astonishment.

In his customary acerbic fashion, Ramsey noted Richardson’s resignation was met by an absurd media frenzy which overlooked that Richo was a “political thug”.

Ramsey noted the irony of Richardson’s resignation occurring on National Wool Day. “Richardson has been pulling the wool over people’s eyes for years,” he said of the “astute if self-serving fixer”.

A cushioned outcome

The reality of Richo’s situation was that he had received inside information that he was about to be caught up in a sex scandal. In August 1993, he’d accepted the services of two Gold Coast sex workers allegedly provided to Richardson by restaurateur Nick Karlos and his former business partner Bob Burgess in exchange for Richardson making favourable representations to a US defence contractor on Burgess’ behalf.

Within days of Burgess giving evidence in camera to the Queensland Criminal Justice Commission, Richo offered his resignation to Keating, no doubt to avoid calls for his resignation when the inevitable avalanche of bad publicity hit, which occurred some weeks later.

But there was a cushioned outcome for Richo in the form of Packer, who paid him $400,000 to be a political commentator, columnist and a backroom lobbyist. There was also his secret shareholding in Offset Alpine, which remained undisclosed for a decade.

There was a sense of unease about the Christmas Eve fire at Offset Alpine’s printing press. Initial police reports could not determine the cause of the fire. One suggested cause was smouldering leftovers from a staff party, but that had finished by 4.30pm.

Years later, a fire investigator, who asked not to be named, told the authors of He Who Must be Obeid that he had done his own inspection of the Silverwater fire on December 28.

In the Lebanese community, Obeid was nicknamed “Sparky” due to his misfortunes with fires. Before Offset Alpine, his printing presses had burnt down twice, he’d had two fires in his homes, and there was a thwarted arson attempt in 1993 at The Bellevue, Obeid’s financially struggling function centre at Bankstown. The tobacconist downstairs called police when he discovered petrol dripping through his ceiling from the function centre above.

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On that occasion, Obeid suggested the culprit was a disgruntled beauty queen who had missed out on the Miss Lebanon title, which had been held at premises the previous night.

The fire investigator had good reason to be suspicious, having investigated the fire at Obeid’s printing press in Marrickville the previous year. On October 6, 1992, only days before Obeid and Rivkin finalised their acquisition of Offset Alpine from Packer, Obeid had suffered a fire at his Marrickville printing plant. One of the staff claimed to have emptied an ashtray in a rubbish bin and then gone off to lunch.

Here was the same fire inspector a year later, looking at the charred remains of yet another fire which had links to Obeid. He noted that the fire had started in three different places, “which is bloody unusual because fires don’t behave like that”.

“I noted that there appeared to be a principal seat beside the main drive of the very old British printing press, plus two smaller seats at intervals along the length of the press. So there were three separate charred areas. That is virtually impossible,” he recalled.

On the same day the fire expert was inspecting the damage at the Silverwater plant, the Australian Stock Exchange was notified that “Offset Alpine Printing Limited has suffered a major fire at its Silverwater printing site”.

But there was good news: The company had recently taken out a large insurance policy which provided for the company to replace its old equipment, valued at a mere $3 million, with state-of-the-art printing presses, as well as coverage for loss of business.

“Offset Alpine will ultimately be a stronger and more profitable company than before the fire,” said the notice.

That was an understatement. Having paid $15 million to buy Offset from Packer’s Cons Press only a year earlier, the Rivkin consortium was to receive $53.2 million from the insurers. By the end of January 1994, the share price had almost doubled. With Packer’s company signed up as a major client, even Packer was later to quip that “it was a very good fire”.

As Neil Chenoweth was later to report in The Australian Financial Review, “December 1994 was the high point of Rivkin’s secret scheme to distribute the profits of the insurance payout, which were paid to Offset Alpine in July 1994. What no one knew was that nearly half of Offset Alpine’s shares – a block now worth more than $26 million – were held in secret Swiss accounts that Rivkin operated at Bank Leumi le-Israel and EBC Zurich for himself, ­Richardson and others.”

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On December 6, 1994, Richardson faxed handwritten instructions to send a million dollars from his Swiss account to a mysterious account in Beirut. The Herald would later reveal that the account was connected to Eddie Obeid, with the million dollars believed to be his share of the insurance payout.

Six months later, on June 6, 1995, Rivkin and his chauffeur, Gordon Wood, were questioned by ASIC about the ownership of the almost 40 per cent of Offset Alpine shares held in Swiss bank accounts. The following night Wood’s fiancee, Caroline Byrne, was alleged to have been thrown to her death at the notorious suicide spot at The Gap.

The temperature had just edged past freezing point on January 8, 2001, as Richardson hurried along Diana Strasse, in Zurich’s financial district, to withdraw cash from one of the Swiss bank accounts ASIC had been interested in.

The account, which was a subaccount of Rivkin’s at Bank Leumi, contained millions of dollars from the secret dealings in Offset Alpine. The Labor Party powerbroker had no idea that he and his close friends, Rivkin and Kennedy, were about to become roadkill in one of the biggest scandals in Swiss banking – one that would ruin their lives.

Four days earlier, the bank had discovered that Ernst Imfeld, their personal banker, had stolen millions of dollars from his clients, including Rivkin and Kennedy.

As if that were not bad enough, two years later, in October 2003, the Financial Review revealed that Rivkin had admitted in sworn testimony to Swiss authorities that the Offset shares frozen by ASIC were owned by himself, Richardson and Kennedy.

The public scandal led to Kennedy resigning from his board positions. Both he and Richardson were pursued by the Australian Tax Office for their failure to pay millions of dollars in taxes. They ended up settling.

Rivkin, who had been convicted of insider trading in April 2003, died in disgrace in 2005.

In December 2008, a jury convicted Wood of murdering his fiancee, with the prosecutor attributing relationship problems along with the fact that she knew too much about the alleged involvement of Wood’s boss, Rivkin, in the affairs of the Offset Alpine printing company.

After Wood was acquitted of Byrne’s murder, he went back for his hat, suing the State of NSW for malicious prosecution. He lost and was hit with almost a million dollars in legal costs.

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