Source : the age
On January 8, 2022, four newly elected councillors gathered at the Crossways Hotel in Strathfield to divide the spoils of political war. Little did they know the meeting would trigger one of the grubbiest feuds in NSW politics, and feature in a major corruption inquiry four years later.
Over lunch and drinks that Saturday, real estate agent Matthew Blackmore, kidney transplant recipient Karen Pensabene, migration agent Sandy Reddy and lawyer-cum-development executive Sharangan Maheswaran struck a handshake deal over who would become the mayor of Strathfield Council following elections the month prior.
The agreement was for Blackmore, an independent, to take the job for at least one year and then hand it over to Pensabene, a Labor councillor. Everyone seemed happy. The only problem was that Blackmore ended up liking the job a little too much. With a big mortgage and rising interest rates, he also liked the $46,010 allowance that topped up his meagre annual councillor fee of $21,000. When the time came to hand over the mayoral chains, Blackmore wavered, and all hell broke loose.
At the Artisaint cafe in Burwood in early 2023, Blackmore told Pensabene and Maheswaran that he wanted to stay on. Anticipating he might say that, the Labor duo helpfully produced a resignation letter written in Blackmore’s name, and told him to sign it.
Maheswaran allegedly told the mayor: “I’ve got a reputation in the party that if I don’t like someone, they don’t get away with crossing me. It would take me about six weeks to take you down.” Blackmore told Maheswaran to “get f—ed”.
Within days, the campaign to assassinate Blackmore politically was in full swing. He fielded sudden media inquiries about his relationship with the council’s controversial former mayor, Antoine Doueihi. He also received a text message from Pensabene in which she said Maheswaran was preparing to print 20,000 scurrilous flyers. “I tried to stop him but he is angry!” Pensabene wrote.
Two days later, the highly stressed Blackmore found several yellow and white flyers stuck under the windscreen wipers of his car in Homebush. The document was a good old-fashioned political “shit sheet” full of potentially damaging information about Blackmore, including his past legal difficulties. “And this isn’t even the worst of it – more to come,” the flyer promised. That same weekend, Maheswaran messaged Blackmore with a warning: “If I can’t convince you, I can’t convince you. I only thought to reach out before things got more serious.”
Blackmore fought back tears when recounting the incident to the Independent Commission Against Corruption this week. He also broke down when discussing a meeting in the council chambers at 5.15pm on the same day he found the shit sheet. At that meeting, mayoral aspirant Pensabene and her enthusiastic backer Maheswaran again told Blackmore he had to honour his agreement to quit as soon as possible.
Maheswaran then made a bombshell revelation: he’d had “operatives” following the mayor the past five months. “I’ve got recordings of you and transcripts,” he said. He read out at least one transcript of a private conversation that Blackmore instantly recognised.
The mayor was told that his enemies knew he and his wife had bought a new home outside the local government area, which could be a bad look with constituents. Maheswaran also said he knew that the mayoral Toyota RAV4 had been used to drive Blackmore’s family to the NSW South Coast town of Gerringong for a holiday. “All of this will go away when you resign from the mayoralty. It’ll all stop,” Maheswaran allegedly said.
Blackmore relented and agreed to step down on March 7, which he scribbled on a piece of paper. Pensabene took over. Remarkably, Blackmore voted for her to become mayor despite everything that had gone down. Why? Because he had sought and received a guarantee that she would get Maheswaran to back off.
The alleged blackmail plot illustrates how the ICAC’s Operation Rosny probe, which is nearing its conclusion after eight weeks of explosive public hearings, is much more than an investigation into dodgy donations or breaches of electoral laws. It is a reminder that democracy in NSW is still at risk of being bought, sold, and weaponised.
Under the laws pledged by the then-premier Dominic Perrottet, all third-party and in-house lobbyists would be required to register with a new lobbying regulator and all MPs – not just ministers – would need to disclose their diaries each month. Senior political advisers would also be precluded from engaging in any lobbying relating to any matter that they had official dealings with in their last 12 months in a government office.
The laws were never introduced by the Coalition or Minns Labor government. The Herald has been told the government is monitoring Operation Rosny closely and will consider a package of reforms likely to come next year once commissioner Fabian Gleeson, SC, hands down his report.
In some ways, the Strathfield saga shows that the public accountability system in NSW can work well. It turns out that Blackmore lodged a complaint with the ICAC over the affair in early 2023; so too did the council’s general manager, Michael Mamo, who had been briefed on the ugly political tussle. The tip-offs immediately attracted the watchdog’s attention, and a senior officer wrote back seeking more information. The chain of events ensured the incident was investigated as part of Operation Rosny.
The ICAC is investigating Maheswaran for dishonestly or partially exercising his official functions, as well as potential blackmail offences and breaches of the Surveillance Devices Act. An aggravated form of blackmail can include threatening to make an accusation that the victim has committed a serious indictable offence – something the flyers left on Blackmore’s car potentially did.
But what unfolded in Strathfield is probably not an isolated incident in the world of local government, which is being overrun by ambitious or compliant party operatives instead of genuine community representatives. Some senior political figures such as John Howard believe political parties should not field candidates for councils. The former prime minister has called the involvement of the Liberal Party in council chambers “crazy”, and a distraction from the main game of the state and federal arenas.
The push to build 800,000 new homes in Sydney over the next 20 years also heightens the risk of undue influence being applied to councils dealing with rezoning and development applications.
The ICAC has for more than five years argued for lobbying regulations to apply to local government, but neither the Coalition nor Labor have made it happen.
At the same time he was orchestrating various political plots at Strathfield Council, Maheswaran was also a senior executive for the Toplace development firm run by fugitive Sydney developer Jean Nassif. The ICAC has heard evidence that he was one of the top henchmen for Nassif, who fled to Lebanon in 2022 and whose company collapsed in 2023 owing $2 billion to home owners, small business operators and others.
Toplace paid Maheswaran nearly $850,000 over just two years.
Exactly why he and his lackey Pensabene went to such lengths to get Blackmore out of the mayoral seat at Strathfield Council remains unclear. He clearly angered them by not honouring a deal to stand aside, and is no angel himself.
In taking the mayoralty for himself in 2022, Blackmore double-crossed a group of independent councillors he had signed an agreement with over which of them would share the top job. He admits to signing the document without any intention of honouring it. And when he was being pressured to quit, Blackmore engaged in threats of his own by telling Maheswaran that he had a photograph of his Subaru Forester parked in the same street as a Croydon brothel, noting “it wouldn’t be good if that photo came out”.
None of this made for harmonious relations. But the ICAC appears to be probing other potential motivations behind Maheswaran’s actions.
In his lengthy written complaint to the ICAC, Blackmore noted that Maheswaran was particularly interested in making sure the council, rather than the state government, led a 30-year plan for the rezoning and redevelopment of Parramatta Road – a potential boon for developers (the strategy was eventually run by the government and promises to deliver 27,000 new homes). This topic also came up in questioning at the ICAC this week.
Curiously, when Blackmore threatened to resign from council entirely over the alleged blackmail plot, Maheswaran apparently urged him to stay – possibly because he needed his vote in the future. “I am concerned that if Sharangan Maheswaran wants to ensure a proposed motion is passed at a council meeting he will continually threaten to publish the information he has obtained about me if I do not vote the way he wants me to vote,” Blackmore wrote in his complaint to the ICAC.
While Strathfield Council was imploding, across the harbour a group of Liberal Party operatives were busy practising their own subversion of democracy. As has now been well ventilated, Charles and Jean-Claude Perrottet, two brothers of the former premier Dominic Perrottet, as well as Christian Ellis and Jeremy Greenwood, allegedly took illegal donations from prohibited donors – including Nassif – in exchange for pursuing political outcomes in Macquarie Street and Sydney’s north-west.
Maheswaran played a starring role as a middleman for Nassif and the conservative Christian Liberal figures. For example, when Charles Perrottet messaged Nassif asking if he could pick up “assistance for the upcoming preselections”, it was Maheswaran who arranged a cheque for $148,500 and gave it to him at the Longueville Hotel.
The ICAC has previously heard Maheswaran also organised private investigator Shane De Kauwe to surveil Toplace critic-in-chief David Elliott in an attempt to dig up damaging information on the then-police minister. De Kauwe has previously told the Herald he “plays with a straight bat” and said allegations about his conduct were untrue.
De Kauwe, a former AFP detective, was also part of the operation to tail Blackmore, the Strathfield mayor. “It’s changed my view about people and safety,” Blackmore says of him and his family being followed. “I can’t go to sleep without checking my house is locked.”
The ICAC says Maheswaran deployed the same playbook in Strathfield as he did in north-west Sydney: damaging and discrediting those who stood in his way. Australian Border Force officials seized his phone and laptop at Sydney Airport in 2023 just days after police raids on Nassif’s home and office.
Maheswaran – a lawyer since 2016, who now works at a firm founded by former senator Nick Xenophon – has been stalking the ICAC proceedings for the past two months, regularly drifting in and out of the hearing room as witnesses provided evidence. He’s even been posting on social media platform X about the proceedings.
Maheswaran will be asked for his version of events, including the serious allegations made about his conduct, at the ICAC next week. Pensabene has also been named by the agency as a key person of interest, but has been released from her summons due to a medical condition.
Maheswaran is no longer on Strathfield Council, but Pensabene is. Both have been suspended from the Labor Party.
If Matthew Blackmore had hoped his troubles would be over after relinquishing the Strathfield mayoralty, he was sadly mistaken.
In the months that followed, Maheswaran lodged his own complaint to the ICAC, accusing Blackmore of having, among other things, inappropriate dealings with Antoine Doueihi and Charbel Demian – two developers who have had various encounters with regulators over the years.
By this time Blackmore had also attracted a new enemy: Mohammad Abedin, a controversial one-time real estate agent who has been convicted of embezzlement and once received a good behaviour bond after screaming homophobic abuse at a Homebush barista who accidentally sprayed cleaning liquid on him.
Abedin ran the Innerwest Property real estate agency and Blackmore worked with him there, bringing in some valuable business. But a dispute over money soured the relationship. Abedin swiftly turned against him and embraced Maheswaran.
When ICAC investigators emailed Abedin’s office asking for any CCTV footage showing the “shit sheet” flyers being placed on the mayor’s car earlier that year, Abedin forwarded the email to his new friend Maheswaran, tipping him off that the ICAC was looking into him.
“You were trying to help him, weren’t you?” counsel assisting the commission Juliet Curtin asked Abedin. He replied: “It wasn’t help. It was just saying what I received.” Curtin didn’t buy that, or many of the other things Abedin told the ICAC this week.
In his complaint to the ICAC following the alleged blackmail plot, Blackmore said the whole experience had altered his life. “I still am in shock that what happened to me could happen in a local council.”
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