Fullerton said Overland was a professional with an appreciation of the issues, and his failure to ensure that Gobbo’s use did not risk involving Victoria Police in illegal conduct or impropriety was “nothing short of egregious”.
The finding outlined Gobbo’s recruitment as a police informer, her interactions with police, the clients she breached her duty of loyalty to and her relationship with Mokbel.
Former police commissioner Simon Overland (centre) in 2019.Credit: Jason South
Fullerton said Victoria Police was complicit in the barrister’s breach of duty to her clients and the course of conduct “grossly improper”.
“I am simply unable to give any weight to the evidence of any of the police witnesses who, in varying ways, sought to extricate themselves from what I consider to be the weight of all the evidence that establishes (on the probabilities) they were party to a joint criminal enterprise to attempt to pervert the course of justice,” Fullerton wrote.
The judge stressed that her findings about a joint criminal enterprise were made on the balance of probabilities, a lower bar than the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt.
Last year, then-director of public prosecutions Kerri Judd, KC, refused to bring a criminal prosecution against anyone involved in the Gobbo scandal.
Gobbo with Mokbel outside court in 2004. She was Mokbel’s barrister at the time.Credit: Nine
Others caught up in the damning findings include former director of public prosecutions John Champion, who was appointed a Supreme Court judge in 2017. Fullerton found Champion breached his duty of disclosure and made an “error of judgment” by failing to inform the court that Gobbo had been working as a police informer.
She was also scathing of evidence provided by Superintendent Boris Buick, a serving police officer, and found he had “persistently obfuscated” information and been deliberately dishonest during his evidence.
Buick headed the investigation that led to the conviction of Faruk Orman over the 2002 murder of gangster Victor Peirce. That conviction was later quashed after the courts found Gobbo’s involvement contaminated the prosecution case.
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Fullerton did not find Overland, Buick or Champion were involved in the joint criminal enterprise.
Fullerton also made wide-ranging findings against Gobbo, including that she had made deliberate and repeated breaches of the duty to her clients.
She said Gobbo had a tendency to hyperbole and duplicity in her recall of events of the time and her relationship with Mokbel was volatile. Gobbo did not give evidence to the court about the conduct of police and prosecutors in the Lawyer X case. Mokbel gave evidence earlier this year.
“I am well satisfied that because of the unique nature of the lawyer/client relationship and the personal relationship she had with the applicant that had developed from September 2001, she also enjoyed both material benefits the applicant was able to provide and the perverse thrill of being a high‑profile lawyer of a suspected member of the criminal underworld, with the dubious status and public profile that accompanied that position,” Fullerton wrote of Gobbo.
The Court of Appeal will use Fullerton’s findings to decide whether Mokbel’s appeal should ultimately succeed.
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