The Acting General Counsel at NSW Maritime has had her practising certificate suspended by the Legal Services Commissioner after it was discovered that she had been using government resources to run a private $120,000 a year private conveyancing business.
Although Tonette Kelly had claimed that she only spent a couple of hours per week on her consultancy sideline and dealt with just a handful of cases, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) didn't agree - and noted that she had in fact sent 4,568 private faxes from her office at NSW Maritime between 2001 and 2009. And by 2004 she reportedly had over 100 clients. She even organised NSW Maritime to pay for her private practice professional indemnity insurance, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald. Oh, and to cap it all, apparently she was not registered for GST and wasn't paying tax either. Otherwise, it was all fine.
And this wasn't Kelly's first brush with the ICAC either. Her conveyancing business was investigated in 2004 but was cleared after she told investigators - misleadingly, as it turned out - that she had only worked on 16 matters. However Kelly didn't seem able to stay out of trouble and last year she faced complaints from two whistleblowers about her consultancy business. Oh, and faced police charges last August for unlawfully accessing a colleague's computer. Yet somehow she managed to cling onto her job.
This time around, however, Kelly has not been so lucky. The ICAC has found that she enagaged in corrupt conduct, cheated on taxes and forged documents to access NSW Maritime's online property account to conduct expensive searches. The commission has recommended that Kelly be given the boot and be prosecuted for misconduct in public office. Meanwhile NSW taxpayers can only be hoping that a federal style shake up of NSW government legal services can't be too far off.
Tip Off ROF
Although Tonette Kelly had claimed that she only spent a couple of hours per week on her consultancy sideline and dealt with just a handful of cases, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) didn't agree - and noted that she had in fact sent 4,568 private faxes from her office at NSW Maritime between 2001 and 2009. And by 2004 she reportedly had over 100 clients. She even organised NSW Maritime to pay for her private practice professional indemnity insurance, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald. Oh, and to cap it all, apparently she was not registered for GST and wasn't paying tax either. Otherwise, it was all fine.
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A bent lawyer yesterday |
And this wasn't Kelly's first brush with the ICAC either. Her conveyancing business was investigated in 2004 but was cleared after she told investigators - misleadingly, as it turned out - that she had only worked on 16 matters. However Kelly didn't seem able to stay out of trouble and last year she faced complaints from two whistleblowers about her consultancy business. Oh, and faced police charges last August for unlawfully accessing a colleague's computer. Yet somehow she managed to cling onto her job.
This time around, however, Kelly has not been so lucky. The ICAC has found that she enagaged in corrupt conduct, cheated on taxes and forged documents to access NSW Maritime's online property account to conduct expensive searches. The commission has recommended that Kelly be given the boot and be prosecuted for misconduct in public office. Meanwhile NSW taxpayers can only be hoping that a federal style shake up of NSW government legal services can't be too far off.