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Police drop case in Australian sex fraud scandal
Source: Agencies |
September 9, 2011, Friday
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A SCANDAL that threatened to bring down Australia's government eased yesterday when police announced they would not charge a lawmaker accused of misusing an official credit card to pay prostitutes.
A conviction for theft or fraud against lawmaker Craig Thomson would have forced him to quit parliament and cost Prime Minister Julia Gillard's year-old government its single-seat majority.
With opinion polls showing the government has become unpopular, observers agree the ruling Labor Party would have little hope of retaining Thomson's seat in a by-election.
New South Wales police yesterday said there was no basis for a criminal investigation.
Thomson released a statement after the decision saying he had "always rejected claims of wrongdoing."
Gillard said she had always accepted Thomson's assurances that he had done nothing wrong.
"I have consistently expressed my confidence in" Thomson, she told reporters in New Zealand, where she was attending a South Pacific leaders' forum.
The allegations, first raised by a Sydney newspaper in 2009, date back to when Thomson was national secretary of the Health Services Union. He allegedly used his union credit card to pay a Sydney brothel thousands of dollars in two transactions in 2005 and 2007.
Thomson denied the allegation and claimed an unnamed man had taken his credit card and forged his signature. Thomson also said the man had repaid the money.
Police did not investigate the allegations because the Health Services Union, which is affiliated with Labor, never made a complaint.
But an opposition senator, George Brandis, wrote to Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione last month with new evidence he claimed proved Thomson had committed a range of crimes, including fraud, which is punishable by 10 years in prison.
The new evidence included a statement from a forensic handwriting expert who said Thomson had probably signed one of the brothel credit card dockets in question. It also included a bundle of recently released court documents that Fairfax would have used in the defamation trial as proof of many more instances in which Thomson paid prostitutes with the same credit card.
With the police investigation under way, the union handed over its own 120-page audit that found Thomson may have misused more than A$100,000 (US$106,450) in union funds while he was in charge from 2002 until 2007.
A conviction for theft or fraud against lawmaker Craig Thomson would have forced him to quit parliament and cost Prime Minister Julia Gillard's year-old government its single-seat majority.
With opinion polls showing the government has become unpopular, observers agree the ruling Labor Party would have little hope of retaining Thomson's seat in a by-election.
New South Wales police yesterday said there was no basis for a criminal investigation.
Thomson released a statement after the decision saying he had "always rejected claims of wrongdoing."
Gillard said she had always accepted Thomson's assurances that he had done nothing wrong.
"I have consistently expressed my confidence in" Thomson, she told reporters in New Zealand, where she was attending a South Pacific leaders' forum.
The allegations, first raised by a Sydney newspaper in 2009, date back to when Thomson was national secretary of the Health Services Union. He allegedly used his union credit card to pay a Sydney brothel thousands of dollars in two transactions in 2005 and 2007.
Thomson denied the allegation and claimed an unnamed man had taken his credit card and forged his signature. Thomson also said the man had repaid the money.
Police did not investigate the allegations because the Health Services Union, which is affiliated with Labor, never made a complaint.
But an opposition senator, George Brandis, wrote to Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione last month with new evidence he claimed proved Thomson had committed a range of crimes, including fraud, which is punishable by 10 years in prison.
The new evidence included a statement from a forensic handwriting expert who said Thomson had probably signed one of the brothel credit card dockets in question. It also included a bundle of recently released court documents that Fairfax would have used in the defamation trial as proof of many more instances in which Thomson paid prostitutes with the same credit card.
With the police investigation under way, the union handed over its own 120-page audit that found Thomson may have misused more than A$100,000 (US$106,450) in union funds while he was in charge from 2002 until 2007.
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