Serial fraudster Craig Thomson faces jail after the ex-MP’s guilty plea

Serial fraudster Craig Thomson, a former federal Labor MP, is facing the prospect of jail, having entered a guilty plea to submitting false and misleading documents to immigration officials, including submitting a document he knew had been forged.

In 2009, the Herald first revealed that Thomson, the former national secretary of the Health Services Union, had used his union credit card to pay $6000 for the services of sex workers. He had also withdrawn more than $100,000 in cash and bankrolled his 2007 election campaign for the central coast seat of Dobell.

Thomson sued the Herald for defamation over the story, but dropped the case in 2011 when further overwhelming evidence emerged, including that his driver’s licence number and signature were on credit card vouchers issued by a Surry Hills escort agency.

Thomson’s mobile phone records also showed two calls had been made to numbers associated with the agency and that someone using his phone was making calls on the drive from his Bateau Bay home on the Central Coast to Sydney on the date the union’s credit card was used at the brothel. A short time later, the same phone was used to call union officials, including HSU boss Michael Williamson.

Thomson did not have the funds to pay Fairfax Media’s costs of $240,000 plus another $100,000 of his own costs. With Labor in a minority government and bankrupts unable to sit in parliament, the NSW Labor Party’s then-boss Sam Dastyari organised for the party to pay Thomson’s legal debts.

Thomson promptly emailed friends and federal party colleagues claiming victory over Fairfax Media.

But Fair Work Australia (FWA) was also investigating the allegations against Thomson for rorting his credit card.

In April 2011, while on a $24,000 taxpayer-funded overseas study trip, the findings of which he plagiarised in his report to parliament, Thomson phoned FWA from his Paris hotel to inform investigators that Fairfax Media had settled the defamation case.

Thomson claimed this was because the paper’s handwriting expert had concluded “the signatures on the credit card forms [for brothel receipts] were forged”.

There was no such handwriting expert.

His claim that he had provided alibi evidence which proved he could not have used the sex workers at the stated times was also a lie.

Incensed, Fairfax’s lawyers wrote to Thomson, saying his evidence was false and deliberately misleading and demanded that he tell the truth. He ignored these demands.

In September 2011, the Herald revealed that both Thomson and HSU head Williamson had received secret commissions from a union supplier. The pair had been given American Express Cards by the union’s printer, who, in turn, was grossly overcharging the union for printing its newsletter.

Thomson was suspended from the Labor Party in 2012 and lost his seat, which he contested as an independent, at the 2013 federal election.

In March 2014, Williamson was jailed for five years for what District Court Judge David Frearson described as his “parasitic plundering of union funds for pure greed”. Although he pleaded guilty to stealing $1 million from the union, it was estimated that Williamson may have stolen about $20 million.

Later that same month, Thomson was sentenced to a jail term in Victoria over multiple fraud and theft charges for rorting his former union. But he was to have better luck. His conviction was overturned due to a technicality that the money was the property of the bank rather than the union.

He was ordered to repay the union, but he never did.

In 2022, the former MP was convicted of using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend his former wife. He was sentenced to an 18-month conditional release order.

Last year, he was again spared jail after pleading guilty to rorting $25,000 in COVID-19 grants. He also pleaded guilty to breaching domestic violence orders.

In December, he will be sentenced for three counts of submitting false or misleading material to immigration officials. Each count can attract a penalty of up to 10 years’ imprisonment.

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