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Newlinds said Thomson knew the documents were “fabricated, fraudulent and misleading”.
Three applications were successful, gaining Thomson $45,000 for his services.
Thomson’s history is riddled with financial crime.Credit: Pat Scala
In 2019, the factory company told Thomson they did not need more workers, but he continued to use fraudulent documents to advise migration agents that he could secure permanent residencies through sponsorships at the factory company.
Those applications were refused, but Thomson still received a total of $35,000. The court heard he has refunded $2000.
One applicant had asked for a baby to be included in the sponsorship application. Thomson wrote a fake letter purporting to be from the factory company, saying they “had agreed to meet the additional burden of sponsoring a child”.
Newlinds said Thomson misled a Commonwealth official and seriously breached the trust of people seeking to live and work in Australia, as well as Australian taxpayers.
He said the “substantially serious” crimes involved “high degrees of dishonesty... and some sophistication to hide his involvement”.
In another scam, Thomson defrauded the Commonwealth JobKeeper COVID scheme of more than $60,000. He lodged tax forms on behalf of a closed-down cafe on the NSW Mid North Coast, falsely showing the business was entitled to JobKeeper payments.
“The offender did so knowing that the cafe and its owners had no knowledge of this and that the cafe was no longer operating,” Newlinds said.
He received 11 payments totalling $61,800, which landed in a business bank account controlled by him and deceptively opened in the name of the cafe.
Newlinds found Thomson committed the offences for financial reasons – likely to repay debts – but described the Crown’s characterisation of “greed” as “an oversimplification”.
The former member for Dobell committed the frauds while seeking to “forge a new career” post-politics, the court heard.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“The stark reality is that the offender has offended before in similar ways... being caught, convicted and sentenced,” he said.
“Accepting that the offender has a complex psychological make-up, I’ve concluded that part of that make-up is an inability to understand why it is wrong to deal with people or governments dishonestly for any purpose, let alone the purpose of obtaining money.”
The judge found Thomson expressed remorse and contrition, but was of a significant re-offending risk.
Thomson had pleaded guilty to three counts of delivering false documents under the Migration Act and one count of deceptively obtaining a financial advantage from the Commonwealth.
The Australian Border Force (ABF) began investigating the visa scam in 2019, alongside the Australian Federal Police (AFP), AUSTRAC and Department of Home Affairs.
In 2009, the Sydney Morning Herald first revealed that Thomson had used his Health Services Union credit card to pay $6000 for the services of sex workers. He also withdrew more than $100,000 in cash and bankrolled his 2007 election campaign for the central coast seat of Dobell.
Thomson sued the Sydney Morning Herald for defamation over the story, but dropped the case in 2011 when further overwhelming evidence emerged, including that his driver’s licence number and signature were on credit card vouchers issued by a Surry Hills escort agency.
Thomson did not have the funds to pay Fairfax Media’s costs of $240,000 plus another $100,000 of his own costs. With Labor in a minority government and bankrupts unable to sit in parliament, the NSW Labor Party’s then-boss Sam Dastyari organised for the party to pay Thomson’s legal debts.
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Thomson promptly emailed friends and federal party colleagues claiming victory over Fairfax Media.
But Fair Work Australia (FWA) was also investigating the allegations against Thomson for rorting his credit card.
In April 2011, while on a $24,000 taxpayer-funded overseas study trip, the findings of which he plagiarised in his report to parliament, Thomson phoned FWA from his Paris hotel to inform investigators that Fairfax Media had settled the defamation case.
Thomson claimed this was because the paper’s handwriting expert had concluded “the signatures on the credit card forms [for brothel receipts] were forged”.
There was no such handwriting expert.
His claim that he had provided alibi evidence which proved he could not have used the sex workers at the stated times was also a lie.
Incensed, Fairfax’s lawyers wrote to Thomson, saying his evidence was false and deliberately misleading and demanded that he tell the truth. He ignored these demands.
In September 2011, the Herald revealed that both Thomson and HSU head Michael Williamson had received secret commissions from a union supplier. The pair had been given American Express Cards by the union’s printer, who, in turn, was grossly overcharging the union for printing its newsletter.
Thomson was suspended from the Labor Party in 2012 and lost his seat, which he contested as an independent, at the 2013 federal election.
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In March 2014, Williamson was jailed for five years for what District Court Judge David Frearson described as his “parasitic plundering of union funds for pure greed”. Although he pleaded guilty to stealing $1 million from the union, it was estimated that Williamson may have stolen about $20 million.
Later that same month, Thomson was sentenced to a jail term in Victoria over multiple fraud and theft charges for rorting his former union. But he was to have better luck. His conviction was overturned due to a technicality that the money was the property of the bank rather than the union.
He was ordered to repay the union, but he never did.
In 2022, the former MP was convicted of using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend his former wife. He was sentenced to an 18-month conditional release order.
Last year, he was again spared jail after pleading guilty to rorting $25,000 in COVID-19 grants. He also pleaded guilty to breaching domestic violence orders.
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