Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size On October 19, 2012, a long-serving Australian Border Force official called Mohamed Deeb took a break from annual leave to stop by his office in Sydney. It was 6.40pm and he was checking on an incoming consignment of clothes. Deeb made seven checks of the Customs database that Friday evening. Twenty hours later, on Saturday evening, he was back at it, checking the clothes import 16 more times. On Monday, the veteran ABF official checked again. Deeb kept monitoring the clothes consignment while on leave up until the import was searched by officials. It was then that officers discovered six kilograms of methamphetamine hidden amongst the clothing. Three hours after the drugs were discovered, Deeb was at it again, performing a final search of the database. It confirmed the consignment had been intercepted or, in the jargon of the criminal underworld, was “hot”. What happened next raises serious questions about Australia’s national anti-corruption regime. At a time when independent MP Cathy McGowan has tabled a private member's bill to establish a federal anti-corruption commission similar to ICAC in NSW or IBAC in Victoria – and the Morrison government argues the existing agencies are up to the task – the case of Mohamed Deeb suggests the national approach is in need of reform. Police and security agencies are frustrated by the alleged involvement of Border Force insiders in helping crime groups avoid detection at Australian ports. Credit:Joe Armao NSW Court of Appeal records reveal that last February, a case against a member of the syndicate suspected of importing the drugs hidden in the clothes collapsed after the court found there was not enough evidence to prove the man was behind the shipment. Evidence tendered earlier in proceedings suggested the syndicate somehow knew the shipment was “hot”. In August, several months after he’d been sacked from the Australian Border Force, Deeb was charged, but neither for drug importation nor corruption. Penny pinching and competing priorities of state and federal police meant authorities took the cheaper and simpler option, according to officials familiar with the matter who did not want to be named.


Deeb was charged in the Parramatta Local Court with three relatively minor data access offences. In return for a guilty plea, the three charges were reduced to one. He is unlikely to do jail time. The clothing consignment is not the only dubious shipment that allegedly involves Deeb. Briefings from law enforcement insiders and documents reviewed by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald suggest that, between 2012 and 2017, Deeb helped facilitate at least three drug importations by providing access to sensitive government databases to powerful organised crime syndicates. Deeb, who was employed as a Customs officer in 2001 before shifting to the newly formed Australian Border Force in 2015, used two federal databases to track shipments which were later found to contain drugs as he worked as the suspected inside man for a crime syndicate with links to Australian underworld kingpin Bassam Hamzy. The now-jailed underworld kingpin Bassam Hamzy. It's not suggested that Deeb actually knew what was in the shipments. His sacking, charges and guilty plea were not part of any public disclosure by the nation’s peak agency for investigating graft, the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity.


The full story of his alleged involvement in multiple drug shipments, and other similar cases, would likely never have been exposed if federal and state officials had not broken ranks to brief The Age and Herald about them. Federal and state police officials claim the Deeb case is just one example of how the existing anti-corruption regime is failing, and how ACLEI is not fit for purpose. A dozen senior serving and former police interviewed over many months are uniform in their consensus that ACLEI is badly outgunned in the battle against organised crime. It is a view shared privately by federal Coalition sources. They say that the agency is simply unable to consistently do its job of exposing major corruption in the Commonwealth. Operations Arrowhead and Dureau The probe into Mohamed Deeb formed part of several secret and now defunct national anti-corruption operations, codenamed Operation Arrowhead and Operation Dureau, which identified suspected threats to Australia’s border security in both Sydney and Melbourne. The threats centred on insiders – Border Force officials with suspected links to Balkan and Middle Eastern organised crime gangs, including a syndicate closely connected to Hamzy, a radical Islamist who is doing time in the Goulburn supermax prison for several crimes including murder, conspiracy to murder, and drug supply. A third operation targeted a suspected Italian mafia member planted inside ABF in Melbourne. The work of Arrowhead and Dureau has never been revealed to the public or politicians, nor has it been subject to a public hearing, which would have enabled ACLEI to examine suspected corruption and its causes in the open.


In fact, since its inception in 2006, ACLEI has not held a single public hearing into any Commonwealth corruption matter. Most of the agency’s public reports are brief and several deal with relatively trivial conduct. Loading Arrowhead and Dureau also exposed major border security weaknesses, including the frequent use of unaccompanied baggage consignments to smuggle drugs, and the extreme vulnerability to corruption of sensitive government databases used by Border Force. Serious concerns about the capacity of ACLEI have been raised consistently over the past decade. Senior policing sources said that Taskforce Marca, which was run by the Australian Federal Police and ACLEI and led to the charging of eight Customs officers with corruption related offences in 2012-13, was wrapped up prematurely. The sources say the decision to finish early left suspected corrupt officers in the field. “We could have gone on for another year at least,” said a senior official involved in the taskforce. Similar concerns have been raised by law enforcement sources in respect of two other ACLEI probes: one targeted corruption in the Melbourne offices of Australia's bio-security agency in 2016; the other involved border officers working at Sydney airport. The Melbourne probe led to another underwhelming court result and, outside of an investigation by The Age, no detailed public exposure of any systemic issues. In most of the cases, ACLEI has been forced to rely on skeleton staff and hand-outs from state and federal policing agencies. In 2016, a senior ACLEI investigator described the agency as struggling to keep up with its workload due to under-resourcing and directed by commissioners not prepared to call a public hearing to expose serious corruption. That staff member left disgruntled. Two years later, identical complaints were made by other insiders.


In early October this year, ACLEI Commissioner Michael Griffin wrote in the agency’s annual report of the “ongoing challenge in managing ACLEI’s workload.” “Maintaining the focus on serious and systemic corruption requires constant evaluation of priorities and resource allocation,” he wrote. “The impact of the most recent change that affects ACLEI’s jurisdiction – the creation of the Department of Home Affairs in late December 2017, bringing into jurisdiction an additional 1000 staff, many of whom perform potentially high corruption risk functions – is yet to be fully determined.” Responding to questions about the effectiveness of its approach, ACLEI told The Age and Herald on Friday that “it is now operating effectively at full capacity having been able to recruit and retain highly skilled and experienced staff.” It said much of its most effective work is necessarily hidden from public view. The focus on serious and systemic corruption requires constant evaluation. Michael Griffin, Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity Commissioner “Targets are almost always skilled in covering their tracks and these investigations are inevitably ‘slow burns’ taking considerable time and being resource intensive,” the statement said. The agency did not explain why key investigations, such as Dureau and Arrowhead, had, according to insiders and court records, not only taken a long time, but failed to lead to significant prosecutions or the public exposure of corruption. Or why many senior police have little faith in its approach.

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