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It has taken four years for Jean Nassif to face some tough questions. It took just 40 minutes for the fugitive developer to buckle under the pressure of his overdue interrogation.
Beaming in to the Independent Commission Against Corruption from his Beirut bedroom for a second day of evidence, Nassif displayed more cracks than a basement slab in one of his dodgy Sydney apartment towers.
After a reasonably calm start, Nassif soon blew a gasket as counsel assisting the Operation Rosny inquiry, Dr Peggy Dwyer, SC, probed his relationship with Liberal Party operatives Jeremy Greenwood, Christian Ellis and Charles Perrottet.
The ICAC is investigating whether Nassif paid the trio a $2 million bribe, but the 58-year-old was in no mood to discuss all that. “If they did any corrupt work, I am not involved with it!” he insisted.
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Instead, Nassif launched an extraordinary attack on David Elliott, a former cabinet minister who was a trenchant critic of Nassif’s Toplace outfit, and David Chandler, the former building commissioner who policed the company’s substandard apartment projects.
Nassif ranted, raved and screamed in scenes more reminiscent of a drunk and deranged uncle making a tit of himself at Christmas lunch than a key witness giving evidence before a major corruption inquiry.
His performance seemed to reveal the real reason why he volunteered to appear before the inquiry despite fleeing to Lebanon in 2022. This was not about helping the commission sort fact from fiction. It was not even about clearing his own name. It appeared to be about something much more primal: settling old scores.
Chandler and Elliott were corrupt, he alleged, while shaking his finger at the camera. They were out to get him. They were nasty men who only looked out for themselves. They had an unfounded vendetta against Toplace. It was all terribly unfair and outrageous, Nassif explained.
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“Why have you not asked me what happened between me and David Elliott and his boys?” he shouted. “Why you haven’t asked me any question about the corrupt politician in the government that should be in jail now for what they did?”
It didn’t end there. If anything, Nassif was just warming up. Fingers were waved at the cameras. Eyes threatened to pop out of his head.
“Mr Nassif, please try to stay calm,” Dwyer pleaded with her witness. “Please don’t shout at me.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,” Nassif screamed back. “If you don’t want to allow me to prove my point, I withdraw from all this nonsense.
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“I know what you’re doing. You want to show the public that I am corrupt. I’m not corrupt.”
Commissioner Fabian Gleeson also urged Nassif to cool it and said the public hearings were not an opportunity for him to smear others.
“No, no, no, no,” Nassif shot back. “No one can make me shut up!” It was perhaps the most candid piece of evidence Nassif delivered all day.
Nassif went on to deny paying money to help get rid of Elliott but agreed he wanted his critics “off my back”.
“I’m not in the business of getting rid of people anyway,” he said. “I never did in my entire life. I’m Christian!”
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He also denied orchestrating the resignation of Chandler as building commissioner in 2022 following a grubby smear campaign. “Don’t make me laugh. Of course not.”
Later, Dwyer suggested to Nassif that he had been involved in highly suspicious financial transactions. “Please behave,” he said to Dwyer, a grown woman with a string of achievements to her name. “I have worked for 35 years. I’m an honourable, honourable man.”
Nassif sought to use his appearance to name five people he said were involved in an extortion plot against him. “I would like to say publicly who they are,” Nassif said. “And you can investigate.” Dwyer and Gleeson shut down the attempt and told him to put it in writing. But even that wasn’t good enough for the developer-cum-conspiracy theorist.
“I’m not going to email anything to the commission because I can see we are not going anywhere in this investigation,” Nassif said. “The deep state is still in control of the country.”
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Nassif fled the country the day before a parliamentary inquiry into his relationship with the Liberal Party began in December 2022. He claims he has been told that “if I go back, I’d be killed” by the Liberal Party’s centre-right faction mafia.
Explaining the timing of his departure, he said he had received an award for being the “No.1 businessman from Arabic background around the world” and he went to collect the gong in Dubai. “That’s why I left.”
And when is he planning to come back? “I will come back when I employ proper lawyers who have balls to fight the establishment. I’m gonna collect a beautiful legal team who are willing to fight politicians to clear my name.”
In other words, probably never.
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Bevan Shields is a senior writer, and former editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.AdvertisementAdvertisement