The findings of the Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants provide a detailed account of who did what during the Purana pizza night, though it’s not clear how they may fit in the frame of Fullerton’s decision.
The royal commission findings name the two Purana detectives who put the drug cook in touch with Gobbo on the day of his arrest, the detectives who interviewed the drug cook armed with confidential information provided by Gobbo, and the senior officers who oversaw what commissioner Margaret McMurdo described as a “high point of Gobbo’s duplicity”.
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The royal commission concluded that former top cop Simon Overland, O’Brien and Gobbo’s police handlers all knew she was informing on the drug cook while purporting to act for him.
Overland testified before Fullerton earlier this year, and the judge was not convinced by everything the former chief commissioner had to say. “I rejected significant aspects of Mr Overland’s evidence as unworthy of acceptance,” she said.
Justice Fullerton isn’t the first respected jurist to conclude that current or former members of Victoria Police have serious cases to answer about their roles in the Lawyer X scandal.
In 2018, seven judges of the High Court characterised the decision by Victoria Police to use a defence lawyer as a registered informant as reprehensible conduct that “debased fundamental premises of the criminal justice system”.
In 2020, counsel assisting the subsequent royal commission, when making their submissions to McMurdo, urged her to find that police who facilitated and oversaw the use of Gobbo as an informant may have committed criminal offences.
Former police commissioner Simon Overland.Credit: Jason South
McMurdo redacted those submissions and made no findings of alleged criminal conduct so as not to unfairly prejudice any future trials. What, then, came of those trials?
This is where the Fullerton judgment breaks important new ground.
A little over a year ago, the prospect of any current or former police facing criminal charges relating to Gobbo’s double life as an informant came to an end following an exchange of legal letters between Kerri Judd, KC, and Geoffrey Nettle, KC.
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Nettle, a former High Court judge, was the Victorian government’s special investigator appointed to prepare briefs of evidence against any current and former members of Victorian police who broke the law in their dealings with Gobbo. Judd, as the director of public prosecutions, had the final say on whether there was enough evidence to lay charges.
In June 2023, Nettle published correspondence showing that, while he was convinced sufficient evidence had been secured to charge current or former officers, Judd was not. Confronted with this impasse, Nettle quit and the government wound up his office.
Fullerton has now found – on balance of probabilities, not beyond reasonable doubt – that Judd’s immediate predecessor as DPP, John Champion, SC, knew from September 2012 that Victoria Police used Gobbo as an informer against Mokbel but took no steps to disclose this for another three years.
This is the first time a court has implicated the DPP in the cover-up that prevented Mokbel and Gobbo’s other clients from learning about her deceit until the High Court intervened. Fullerton described it as an error of judgment.
The finding will raise questions about whether the Office of Public Prosecutions should have had the final say on any charges relating to Lawyer X.
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