CFMEU/Labor chief Dave Hanna jailed for $160K in corrupt contributions to his house-construction
Friday, 15 November 2019
Hanna received $160K worth of secret-commission contributions to the construction of his house from builder Mirvac.
The Gillard/Wilson/Blewitt slush fund received $750K (today's value) in secret commissions from construction company Thiess.
Why was Hanna's crime prosecuted while Gillard/Wilson and Blewitt remain untouched?
Here's part of Charlie Peel's authoritative report in The Australian today.
Crown prosecutor Mark Whitbread said crimes such as corruption were “difficult to detect” and therefore warranted severe penalties as deterrence.
He said the wider community would be harmed by such crimes by “increasing costs of construction”.
“That seems to be lost on all sorts of people who engage in this sort of conduct,” he said.
Mr Whitbread said the offending also affected the tradesman who carried out the building work on Hanna’s home because they had “no choice but to assist because they could lose work”.
“That’s a significant feature the community would be concerned with,” he said.
Mr Whitbread said Hanna had betrayed the thousands of union members he was supposed to represent.
“He was the one most responsible for his members,” he said.
“His conduct has failed that enormously.”
Hanna’s barrister, Mark McCarthy, said his client, who quit the CFMEU in 2015 ahead of the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption, would sell the home that benefited from the building works to pay restitution for his crime.
Mr McCarthy said the only party that had been financially affected as a result of the corrupt building works was Mirvac.
But Judge Farr said the businesses that supplied the labour to carry out the building work had also suffered financially because they had conducted the work for free, rather than submitting false invoices tying it to a shopping centre development.
While on bail for the corruption charge, Hanna raped a 30-year-old woman he met at a Fortitude Valley nightclub in March 2017.
He was sentenced to six years in prison for that offence and was eligible for parole in 2022.
Hanna was also convicted in December of destroying tonnes of documents being sought by the trade union royal commission for which he was sentenced to nine months imprisonment but released immediately on a good behaviour bond.
Hanna has three children, the youngest of whom is 16, from his marriage that broke down about the same time as the royal commission.
ENDS
Follow some of the money trail from the Thiess secret commissions paid into the Gillard/Wilson/Blewitt slush fund here: