Source :- THE AGE NEWS
When Essendon Football Club unveiled luxury car firm Dutton as its new major sponsor, it issued a media release describing the deal as heralding “a new era” for the Bombers that would last until the end of the 2026 season.
“The three-year partnership will see the Dutton Automotive logo featured on the Bombers’ AFL playing and training guernseys and apparel, as well as extensively throughout the club’s assets,” the AFL club’s statement in 2023 said.
Unbeknown to Essendon, it was not the only organisation making statements about the high-end car dealer.
In the months leading up to the sponsorship announcement, the nation’s most secretive and powerful law enforcement organisation, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), had sent confidential briefings to the state and federal policing agencies operating in Victoria.
They described how, in July 2022, the commission had designated the “Dutton Group of Companies” as a Victorian “Regional Priority Organisation Target” or RPOT.
This meant police intelligence gathered and analysed by the commission indicated Dutton was suspected of facilitating the activities of “resilient, well-resourced criminal entities that exploit national and international connections posing a threat to Australia’s national interest”.
The reason for the designation was intelligence that bikie gang members and serious organised crime figures were exploiting gaps in Dutton’s business operation to clean or deploy the proceeds of crime.
“[Dutton Group companies] have come to the attention of multiple law enforcement agencies for activity which suggests they are likely enabling serious and organised crime (SOC) entities,” stated one confidential law enforcement briefing sighted by this masthead.
There is no suggestion the Bombers could have known about law enforcement suspicions or Dutton’s RPOT designation— not least because it has never been aired or tested in a court of law.
But Dutton is far from the only prominent AFL club sponsor that has attracted intense law enforcement attention or which operates in an industry known to be vulnerable to exploitation from the darker elements of society.
Over the past 12 months, a string of AFL club sponsors have been exposed in separate scandals in a pattern that a leading sporting integrity expert — who has previously advised the AFL — said both clubs and the AFL itself did negligible vetting of club sponsors.
This year, the Melbourne Football Club was forced to ditch its 2026 guernsey sponsor, security firm MA Services, after it emerged it was at the centre of a multi-agency tax and worker exploitation scandal and had links to bikies.
In the private security industry, MA was notorious for underpaying its foreign workers and the partying life of its disgraced chief executive Micky Ahuja.
Had the Demons – or any of the other AFL clubs MA Services previously sponsored, including Collingwood, Hawthorn or Brisbane – conducted basic due diligence on Ahuja, they would have learned that he had registered a brothel and sex worker business, Top Melbourne Escorts. Had they called the Geelong Cats, they likely would have learned the club’s home ground operator had previously sacked MA over integrity concerns.
Geelong has faced its own sponsor scrutiny. In August, former Cats sponsor, playboy businessman Sy Giang Nguyen, was hit with more than 300 charges by police over an alleged multimillion-dollar fraud.
Nguyen had used his previous status as club sponsor to ingratiate himself with serving and former players in a manner that also raised red flags. His lavish spending directed towards the club — he plied players with thousands of dollars of free hospitality and partied with them at Crown Casino and in Las Vegas after the 2009 grand final — far exceeded what he could seemingly afford on an IT manager’s salary at a disability services provider.
Long-time former Carlton sponsor and existing labour hire and traffic management service provider MC Labour has been repeatedly implicated in the long-running CFMEU scandal.
MC was exposed as giving kickbacks to a now former senior union organiser in 2014; in 2024 and 2025, it was implicated in ghost shift rorts on the Big Build and over its previous dealings with ex-bikie gang boss Toby Mitchell, a close friend of the son of MC’s wealthy owner.
In the VFL, Port Melbourne has similarly been implicated in the CFMEU scandal over allegations building companies were pressured by the union to sponsor the club.
While the allegations levelled in secret law enforcement briefings against Essendon sponsor Dutton are the most serious, albeit unproven, they were also the hardest for the club or the AFL to have uncovered through their own due diligence.
In a statement, Essendon said it was unaware of any claims against Dutton and that its partnership with the company would cease at the end of the season in October.
But it is unclear if Essendon, as with many of the other AFL clubs whose sponsors have faced scrutiny, did any due diligence, even after authorities in Australia and overseas had repeatedly warned that the luxury car market was deeply exposed to organised crime exploitation.
Multiple official sources, not authorised to speak publicly, said the ACIC became focused on Dutton in early 2022 when state and federal agencies separately gathered intelligence suggesting the company may have not been doing enough to prevent criminals using dirty money to buy cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Under Australian law, if a business is proven to have failed to act on a “reasonable suspicion” of money laundering, it has committed a serious offence.
One report, circulated among law enforcement officials in 2023, described how police had detected “DGCs’ [Dutton Group Companies] lending DGCs’ registered luxury vehicles to SOC [serious organised crime] entities”.
Intelligence suggested the company or its subsidiaries may be facilitating “deliberate practices designed to avoid paying luxury car tax” and “meeting with known Outlaw Motorcycle Gang members at DGCs outlets.”
Analysis by financial crime analysts had detected allegedly “suspicious cash transactions and layering through DGC accounts consistent with [alleged] money laundering activity”.
Both the NSW Police and NSW Crime Commission also had grave concerns about dealings between Dutton company insiders and a Sydney luxury watch dealer running a Dubai-Australian syndicate known as the “watch cartel” and who was “likely involved in drug import and money laundering activities”.
The cartel encouraged suspected drug traffickers to buy expensive watches at inflated prices, with cash in both Dubai and Australia, and then resell them as a means of disguising the original illicit source of funds.
“In contrast to a bag of cash, a crook can wear a luxury watch at an airport border crossing and not be stopped,” one source aware of the watch cartel activities said.
As another intelligence finding warned, the watch cartel boss was “likely facilitating money laundering on behalf of SOC [serious organised crime] entities by utilising personnel employed at DGCs [Dutton Group Companies] to facilitate the sale of high-end luxury watches and the obfuscation of illicit funds through related bank accounts and via the movement of watches internationally.”
The formerly privately owned Dutton, which was acquired by Japanese conglomerate Sojitz Corporation, in May 2023, declined to comment when contacted by this masthead.
But a company insider stressed the firm had extensive anti-money laundering controls in place for years and was unaware of any unlawful activity facilitated by the firm.
Policing sources said the ACIC’s July 2022 designation of Dutton as a high-priority target had not led to a full-blown investigation by any single agency.
There is no suggestion by this masthead that Dutton, or any of its serving or former managers or owners, engaged in any criminal activity.
The AFL declined to respond to whether it intended to press clubs to conduct thorough vetting of sponsors in the future.
The Dutton allegations highlight a troubling pattern of AFL club sponsors facing serious probity questions—an issue league insiders privately concede must be addressed.
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Nick McKenzie is an Age investigative journalist who has three times been named the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year. A winner of 20 Walkley Awards, including the Gold Walkley, he investigates politics, business, foreign affairs and criminal justice.Connect via email.
