Police examine potential corruption of public officials in $33m land deal
Police are combing through more than 800 documents from the Auditor-General to see if there was any fraud relating to the $32.8 million sale of land near the Western Sydney Airport.
The Australian Federal Police confirmed to a Senate estimates hearing they formally launched an investigation on July 27, after hearing from the Auditor-General on July 10 about the matter.
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw has launched an investigation into a $33 million land deal .Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Deputy Commissioner Ian McCartney said the investigation was at an early juncture as police assessed 256 gigabytes worth of material provided by the audit office on August 28.
"We haven't identified any criminality in relation to the investigation at this stage," he said.
"We can't rule anybody out but we can't rule anybody in either.
"We've probably got more of a focus on division 142 [of the criminal code], which is corruption of public officials, it's an offence that we'll assess."
He confirmed police were also looking for potential crimes of obtaining property by deception or other fraudulent conduct.
The 2018 purchase of the land dubbed the Leppington Triangle came under scrutiny from the Auditor-General after the government valued it at just $3 million less than a year after buying it for $29.8 million, plus $3 million GST.
Auditor-General Grant Hehir told senators late on Monday night while he didn’t find direct evidence of fraud, there were “gaps in the evidence” gathered.
"There's a whole pile of sequences of actions which we couldn't explain. We could hypothesise various different assumptions of what may have happened but it wasn't clear to us why it would happen," he said.
"Some of the issues were suggestive of that the Commonwealth may have been defrauded."
AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw said Mr Hehir had told him he could not find any other occasion within the past 20 years that issues raised in an audit were referred to police and therefore "there was no established procedures on the best way to manage this".
Infrastructure Department secretary Simon Atkinson revealed on Monday he has stood down one bureaucrat and moved another out of the western Sydney section, while the department has launched four separate investigations into the deal.
"I think something is not right and I intend to get to the bottom of it and fix it," he said.
The discrepancy was discovered by a mid-level accountant with the department.
ANAO executive director Brian Boyd said the valuation approach used for the Leppington Triangle land was different to what the department used on other occasions. The valuer used was suggested by the land owner and was given instructions including to treat the land – part of a dairy farm – as if it were zoned for industrial use.
"Essentially we ended up paying around $2.4 million per hectare for land that other valuations were saying only was worth around $120,000 per hectare," Mr Boyd said.
Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack has said the deal would come to be seen as a bargain in time, but Mr Atkinson said he wasn't aware of anything to support that assertion.
Australian Public Service Commissioner Peter Woolcott described the audit report as "very grim reading".
He had "an open mind" on whether the issues were confined to the Western Sydney Unit – which has now been folded into another section of the department – or was wider spread.
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