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The former judge who headed an inquiry into former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann’s sexual assault prosecution has lost a bid to overturn a finding he engaged in serious corrupt conduct by leaking information to the media.
In a damning report, released in March, the ACT Integrity Commission found Walter Sofronoff, KC, “dishonestly concealed” the fact he had given a copy of his final report to The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen and a second journalist before it was publicly released. No findings were made against the journalists.
Walter Sofronoff, KC, repeatedly messaged journalist Janet Albrechtsen and eventually leaked her an advance copy of his probe’s final report.Credit: Edwina Pickles, Robert Shakespeare
The ACT corruption watchdog found Sofronoff’s conduct “significantly compromised the integrity of the inquiry” and the former Queensland Supreme Court judge had engaged in serious corrupt conduct.
Sofronoff sought to overturn those findings in the Federal Court. In a judgment delivered on Thursday, Justice Wendy Abraham rejected Sofronoff’s court challenge.
“I order that the application is dismissed. The court will hear from the parties as to costs,” Abraham said.
In written reasons, Abraham said the commission’s “conclusion that Mr Sofronoff engaged in serious corrupt conduct remains”.
The ACT corruption watchdog said in its report this year that Sofronoff gave a raft of additional confidential material to Albrechtsen, including witness statements, drafts of the report and proposed adverse findings against the then ACT director of public prosecutions, Shane Drumgold, SC.
“The overall chain of events in Mr Sofronoff’s communication with Ms Albrechtsen shows that over time he lost sight of the important public function he was discharging,” the commission said.
Text messages between Walter Sofronoff, KC, and Janet Albrechtsen.
Parallel to the inquiry, Sofronoff was “engaging privately with Ms Albrechtsen … who was not a participant in the inquiry and who was known to have strong views about issues that would certainly be the subject of the report to government”, the report said.
The commission said Sofronoff “should at least have given fair notice of his intention to provide a copy of the report to journalists” – Albrechtsen and the ABC’s Elizabeth Byrne – before ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr made it public.
It was “exclusively for the government to consider what to do about publication”, the watchdog said.
Sofronoff gave the final report to Albrechtsen about 2.12pm on July 31, 2023, shortly after giving it to Barr, and to Byrne about 8pm on August 2.
The Australian published its first articles about the report online late on August 2, 2023. The ABC published a story the following afternoon. The government released the report on August 7.
The commission said Albrechtsen told Sofronoff in a phone call on August 2 that “she and a colleague had obtained a copy of the report from another source” before publishing a story.
Sofronoff told the commission he had given the report to the journalists on the basis its contents would not be published until after the report was released by the government. The watchdog said there was “no evidence” they did not comply with the embargo.
Lehrmann’s ACT Supreme Court criminal trial was aborted in 2022 owing to juror misconduct. He did not face a second trial owing to concerns about the mental health of the complainant, his former colleague Brittany Higgins.
Text messages between Walter Sofronoff, KC, and Janet Albrechtsen, in which the latter says she loved a section of his draft report in the inquiry into the Bruce Lehrmann prosecution.
Lehrmann lost a multimillion-dollar defamation case last year against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson after Federal Court Justice Michael Lee concluded to the civil standard – on the balance of probabilities – that Lehrmann raped Higgins in Parliament House in March 2019.
Lehrmann appealed against that decision and lost. In a decision last week, the Full Court of the Federal Court went even further than Lee and found Lehrmann knew Higgins was not consenting to sex, rather than being reckless about whether she was consenting.
In his final report, Sofronoff had found the Lehrmann prosecution was properly brought, but made damaging findings against Drumgold.
Drumgold, who quit his role, challenged the report’s findings in the ACT Supreme Court and won.
The court found Sofronoff’s communications during the inquiry with Albrechtsen, who had authored a series of articles critical of Drumgold, gave rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias on Sofronoff’s part. This is not a finding of actual bias but of the appearance of it.
The integrity commission said the court’s judgment in the Drumgold litigation, delivered in March last year, “had the effect of rendering the findings against Mr Drumgold legally invalid”.
The report had “destroyed at least one professional and personal reputation by findings that were, in significant part, vitiated by jurisdictional error and, with the benefit of hindsight, ought never to have been published”, it said.
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