A group of Liberal party MPs, including the former prime minister and then federal opposition leader Tony Abbott, are under scrutiny over $250,000 worth of designer watches they were given by a visiting billionaire from China almost three years ago – that were assumed to be fakes.

Among them is the embattled MP Stuart Robert, who was then the opposition’s defence, science, technology and personnel spokesman, and is now under intense political pressure over a controversial trip to China in 2014.

“Instant noodle billionaire” Li Ruipeng, the chair of the Li Guancheng Investment Management Group, gave Abbott, Robert and the then opposition industry spokesman, Ian Macfarlane, designer watches out of a plastic bag at an informal dinner at Parliament House in June 2013 as a goodwill gesture.

There were also watches for Abbott’s wife, Margie, and Robert’s wife, Chantelle, who were not present at the dinner – but not Abbott’s then chief of staff, Peta Credlin, who was.



(The then Queensland minister Rob Molhoek also received a Cartier Ballon Bleu bracelet watch, valued at $23,400, from Guancheng in 2013 – the most expensive gift received by any Newman government official in that financial year, and surrendered by Molhoek to the Ministerial Services Branch.)

Macfarlane, assuming his Rolex was a fake worth between $300 and $500, declared the gift with the clerk of the House of Representatives but kept it (“and wore it occasionally,” says the Herald Sun).

Macfarlane had the watch valued in Sydney after the September federal election, after the then Liberal candidate for Moore, Ian Goodenough, favourably compared it to his own, genuine Rolex.



Macfarlane was told his watch was worth about $40,000 – and his had obviously not been as expensive as those given to Abbott and Margie Abbott.

Though the clerk told him he was entitled to keep it, he returned it to Li Ruipeng’s company and alerted Liberal “fixer” Tony Nutt, who – the Australian Financial Review reports – ordered the immediate collection of the watches so that they could be returned.

Robert and Abbott complied – though a spokesman for Abbott denied it was on Nutt’s advice.

The spokesman told Guardian Australia that the two watches given to him were declared as well, though Abbott had also taken them to be fake. It wasn’t so much the gift, as the way it was given, he said.

“My understanding is that they were handed over in a plastic bag, as has been reported, and I think everybody was of the same view,” he said.



“They were declared in the normal way. As with most parliamentarians, it’s better to over declare than under declare but I believe Mr Abbott was of the understanding that they were fake, given the way that they were handed over, and, when it became apparent that they weren’t, they were handed over straight away.”

Asked by Guardian Australia whether Robert had, like Macfarlane, assumed at first the watch was a fake, a spokesman said there was “nothing to add to the story that’s not already out there” but confirmed that it had been returned.

Macfarlane’s office has been contacted for comment.

Less than a year later in August 2014, Robert, the then assistant defence minister, took what he says was a “personal” trip to Beijing with friend and Liberal Party donor Paul Marks to celebrate a mining deal.

He is now fighting to save his ministerial career as Labor accuses the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, of failing to enforce his own standards.

Phillip Coorey writes in the Australian Financial Review that Roberts “should have learned from the watches to tread warily in China”.

The senior public servant Martin Parkinson will determine whether Robert breached the ministerial code of conduct with his trip to China.