A disgraced former Labor MP has been jailed for at least two years and six months for a multi-million dollar migration fraud scheme and Covid payments scam.
Serial fraudster Craig Thomson, 62, who used union funds to pay for prostitutes while head of the Health Services Union in the mid-2000s, previously pleaded guilty to three counts of delivering a document containing a false statement and one count of obtaining a financial benefit by deception.
On Thursday he was sentenced in the Sydney District Court to four years’ jail with a 2.5-year non-parole period by Judge Robert Newlinds SC, who found Thomson pocketed more than $2 million from the migration fraud, and $61,800 from claiming Covid JobKeeper payments from a non-operational café.
The court heard Thomson charged visa applicants between $35,000 and $50,000 to assist with their visa applications, regardless of the application outcome, acting as a middle man even though he was not a registered migration agent.
“[Applicants] thought they were dealing with a skilled and trusted official,” Judge Newlands said, ABC News reported.
“The applicants were unaware of the fraud.”
The court heard Thomson arranged to help a company sponsor immigrants to work in its factories in Australia and promised the company a “training fee” for each successful applicant, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
But he did not divulge that the workers did not qualify for sponsorship, and forged the company’s boss’s signature, made up fake contracts, and fabricated organisational charts for non-existent positions to submit applications to a registered migration agent.
Three applications were successful, but when in 2019 the company told Thomson they did not need more workers he continued to use fake documents
Thomson, who was MP for Dobell on the NSW Central Coast until 2013, claimed he was struggling financially and used the proceeds of his crimes to pay off debts, and argued he should be spared jail due to be being high-profile and a former member of parliament.
But Judge Newlinds noted “most people suffer financial stress from time to time in their life and do not resort to criminal conduct to deal with the situation”, and Thomason had a long history of fraud.
He found Thomson, who has been previously spared jail, fined, and given a community corrections order, was a “serious risk of reoffending” and that his “earlier find did not cause him to mend his ways”.
Header image: Craig Thomson (public domain).
The post Whoremonger ex-Labor MP jailed for multi-million dollar migration fraud first appeared on The Noticer.
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