Former NUW NSW branch secretary Derrick Belan has been sentenced to four years' jail on 60 charges that involved more than $650,000 of union funds, including personal spending on a tattoo, Botox treatments, holidays and a Harley Davidson motorcycle.
The AFP have agreed to pay former CFMEU organiser John Lomax an undisclosed settlement after he sued them for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution over his alleged blackmail of a Canberra painting company during enterprise agreement negotiations.
Key witnesses in this week's collapsed criminal case against two Victorian CFMEU leaders told the Melbourne Magistrates Court that nobody mentioned the word "blackmail" to them until more than a year after a crucial meeting in April 2013.
Police engaged in "material" non-disclosure and misrepresentation when obtaining telephone intercept warrants against two Victorian CFMEU officials in 2015, the Melbourne Magistrates Court heard today.
The TWU has been penalised more than $270,000 for failing to remove almost 21,000 unfinancial members from a state branch register over a 12-year period.
The legislative tension between state and federal union rules has been highlighted after a tribunal dismissed an expelled official's bid for reinstatement on the basis that it lacked the jurisdiction to give orders or directions to a national body.
The CFMEU has begun legal action in the ACT Supreme Court alleging the Federal Police taped a private phone call between a CFMEU official and a former ACT Police Minister's office and then leaked it to the media.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has quietly established a special unit that has multiple investigations afoot in the commercial construction industry.
The ABCC has reviewed its legal expenditure after an "overspend" in the past financial year that included a blowout to almost $11 million in billings for external advice, representing about a third of its $34 million budget.
The Federal Court has today made a consent order under which the AFP will not pass on documents seized in Tuesday's raids on the AWU, and the Registered Organisations Commission will not accept them, until the union's bid to stop the investigation of the matter has been heard.
