Watchdogs spent millions with security firm linked to Finks bikie gang

A booming private Australian security firm that has won contracts with federal law enforcement agencies, the nation’s corruption watchdog, federal departments and AFL clubs is secretly running a security immigration operation on Nauru with a bikie gang-linked contractor and the country’s allegedly corrupt president.

Company files and testimony from multiple sources implicate MA Services and its chief executive Micky Ahuja in the bikie-linked deal to provide security to up 350 Australian immigration system deportees on Nauru.

The arrangement could see Ahuja and the bikie-gang figures share in a multimillion-dollar security contract ultimately funded by the Albanese government.

This masthead’s investigation can also reveal persistent allegations from company insiders of serious wrongdoing by MA Services involving mistreatment and exploitation of staff. Those claims are further supported by internal documents and public court cases.

In 2023, Victoria’s labour hire regulator applied a raft of conditions to its licence to operate, while the firm was separately accused in state parliament of exploitation on government projects. Insiders also claim female MA Services employees are mistreated.

The allegations about MA Services raise serious questions for the Albanese government over its payment of millions of taxpayer dollars to the firm, and likewise for its blue-chip corporate and sporting clients.

Among MA Services’ contracts is a $3.83 million three-year deal to guard the offices of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) – which is responsible for targeting bikie gangs – at the same time as key company personnel are dealing with firms controlled by a bikie gang.

It’s also been paid $1.1 million to guard the National Anti-Corruption Commission. Elsewhere, it is being paid more than $19 million to guard the departments of Parliamentary Services, Agriculture and Climate Change and more than $3 million in services for security for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, despite facing allegations it improperly undercuts its rivals in the security industry.

Those contract details are publicly available, but MA Services’ role in the Nauru security operation to protect the small Pacific Island population from deportees deemed too dangerous to stay in Australia, but given visas to Nauru, has been a tightly held secret.

Earlier this month, the security operation – which is ultimately funded by the Albanese government via its deal with Nauru to take the so-called NZYQ detainees – was plunged into a scandal after an ex-soldier turned whistleblower Oisin Donohoe revealed it involved the Finks outlaw motorcycle gang.

The security deal is also deeply controversial because it was overseen by the allegedly corrupt Nauruan president, David Adeang.

It can be now revealed MA Services and its chief executive, Micky Ahuja, played a key role in setting up the Nauru security deal, while the firm simultaneously sought to distance itself from the operation.

As part of securing the security contract, Ahuja worked closely with senior MA Services employee Tim Jones, who is also a bikie gang associate and helped bring the Finks into the Nauru deal.

“Do not mention MA to anybody,” Jones told his colleagues as he worked on the Nauru deal, according to sources who dealt with him.

“It was all hush-hush when it was set up,” another MA insider told this masthead, while also claiming Ahuja and Jones owned the corporate vehicle they created to run their Nauru operation: Nauru Community Safety.

Neither Ahuja nor Jones responded to messages sent by this masthead over the last month.

Text messages sighted by this masthead show both Ahuja and Jones discussing the Nauru deal, and Jones was photographed recently in Nauru during an ANZAC Day ceremony in a Nauru Community Safety uniform.

In one MA Services document, Ahuja is listed as the “director” of Nauru Community Safety and Jones as the “general manager operations”. Several other MA executives are listed as senior managers of the Nauru firm, including a former federal police officer, Dirk McLean.

Sources said McLean was so concerned about the integrity of the Nauru deal, he repeatedly warned about it inside the company’s headquarters.

Jones’ connections to the bikie world are deep and longstanding due to his ties to Finks global boss Ali Bilal. Jones variously claimed to be a serving or former bikie gang affiliate to multiple MA staff who spoke to this masthead; his son is a fully patched member of the Finks; and Jones owns the NSW house where Bilal lives.

Jones has also worked for and promoted Bilal’s company, Safe Hands, as an MA Services sub-contractor in Victoria, NSW and, most recently, Nauru.

Jones is also very close to Ahuja and described, in a recently deleted LinkedIn post, how Ahuja was an “incredible CEO” and had provided Jones a “stunning 2025 Ford Everest Sport”.

“Your exceptional leadership inspires both me and our team every day at MA Services Group,” the post said.

This masthead can also reveal the family of allegedly corrupt Nauru President David Adeang had direct involvement in the security deal. In November 2024, the president dispatched his son, Damon Adeang, to the Melbourne offices of MA.

Multiple MA insiders said they were told that a “VIP” was coming to discuss a sensitive security contract and when Damon Adeang entered the premises, he was variously introduced as the “prince” of Nauru and the son of the president.

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing against Damon Adeang, but his father David Adeang has a sordid history of suspected corruption, with Australian security agencies previously warning the federal government he might have pocketed alleged kickbacks paid by firms subcontracted to run Australia’s offshore processing regime on Nauru.

Adeang was confronted in a private meeting earlier this month in Canberra by Foreign Minister Penny Wong a day after this masthead and 60 Minutes revealed the Finks’ role in the Nauru deportee operation, which is ultimately funded under a 30-year deal with the Australian government worth $2.5 billion dollars.

“I made our expectations about those matters clear … I think he understands what our position is. And our position obviously is one that we expect Australian funds to be used in the appropriate way,” Wong told the ABC’s 7.30 program of her conversation with Adeang.

Greens senator David Shoebridge on Tuesday night accused Adeang of historical corruption: pocketing millions of dollars of Australian taxpayer money from the federal government’s previous use of Nauru as an offshore migration outpost in 2020.

To back up his claims, Shoebridge told the Senate that in 2020, Australia’s financial crime agency, Austrac, had produced a confidential report alleging Adeang’s involvement in “corruption and money laundering”.

MA Services’s dealings with the Adeang regime, and bikie gang-linked figures are not the company’s only connection to the suspect characters or dubious practices.

In 2018, a security industry identity with underworld ties – and who had previously been arrested by police for a tax fraud scheme involving cash payments to security guards – provided advice to MA Services about how to expand its business. The man brought in several of his associates to MA, but left after a falling-out with Ahuja.

MA Services insiders said another MA manager still working at the firm has claimed to have links with a notorious Sydney crime family.

This masthead has spoken to eight serving or former MA Services insiders who allege the company has engaged in murky behaviour, including the use of sub-contractors to avoid paying guards and cleaners their full entitlements or to shirk tax obligations.

This masthead has also spoken to seven security industry insiders who raise serious allegations about MA Services’ operations, and separately obtained formal documents revealing authorities, tribunals and the firm’s clients have all held major concerns about the company’s practices.

One MA Services insider alleged payslips were falsified to cover up the use of sub-contractors and sham contracting, which involves treating employees as individual contractors to avoid paying them properly; a second company insider also alleged the firm used sub-contracts and cash payments to maximise its profits and undercut rivals.

Those company sources, along with three other MA insiders, described the allegedly appalling treatment of women who worked for MA, including cases of serious intimidation.

According to one source, females in the company were often too fearful to speak about their mistreatment: “Everyone was scared.”

In one instance cited by MA Services sources, Tim Jones and two other senior MA managers visited the family home of a senior NSW female MA Services employee who had departed the company and allegedly intimidated her when demanding the return of company property.

A photo of the MA Services trio, obtained by this masthead, was briefly posted online by one of the men with an apparent Indian taunt that roughly translates to: “Don’t confuse us with those who ever back down.”

A sixth MA insider alleged the firm used up to six different payroll companies in an apparent bid to avoid payroll tax, while claiming the remuneration package for a senior executive was spread across four family members to also avoid tax.

A seventh source said as recently as September, MA Services allegedly used a shadow set of employee records to conceal underpayment of security guards.

The source said the guards were “at risk of exploitation, particularly as many are students, are on student or other restricted visas, welfare payments, or unemployment benefits, and are breaching work conditions by working excessive hours”.

MA Services’ clients have also raised serious concerns, with a 2018 letter to the firm from a Victorian government contractor consortium raising allegations that MA was “not meeting its obligations” to pay full entitlements to security guards on a major government project, “exposing us to a risk of prosecution by the Fair Work Ombudsman.”

In response to the 2018 complaint, MA blamed “simple human error” and vowed to “amend the discrepancies of previous payments” to security guards and “remedy them moving forward”.

In August 2020, Victoria’s then-shadow attorney-general Edward O’Donohue used parliamentary privilege to claim MA was ripping off workers on taxpayer-funded projects and that the “very serious allegations” facing the firm “must be investigated”.

Over a year later, the firm told a New Zealand tribunal that inadvertent error was to blame in a security guard’s underpayment case and committed to “undertaking a payroll audit”. The New Zealand Employment Relations Authority savaged MA for sacking the guard, ruling his dismissal was “unjustified” due to “the lack of any fair process” and that he should be compensated for “hurt and humiliation”.

The NZ authority also declared it had uncovered “systemic irregularities” in the guard’s pay on public holidays, finding MA Services had breached the country’s Holidays Act.

In 2023, the firm was criticised in an Australian Fair Work Commission case brought by an MA Services guard working at Coles and who claimed MA Services had unlawfully pressured him to quit. He claimed he was told that unless he could “personally apprehend” more shoplifters, he would have his hours cut and was threatened with reduced shifts when he “raised safety concerns”.

In its judgment, the commission described the sworn evidence of two MA managers who challenged the guard’s claims as “unreliable”, finding that one of them was “completely unaware of the existence or the contents of the enterprise agreement” which set out what a security guard should be paid.

The commission concluded that while the improper dismissal case brought by the guard failed on a legal technicality, the evidence still showed he had been “stood down without pay contrary to his entitlements” and that MA had no intention of being “bound by the contract of employment”.

In the same year, Victoria’s Labour Hire Authority said it would only permit MA to operate in the state subject to a range of conditions, including MA’s agreement to tear up agreements that limited overtime or holiday pay and to “engage an appropriate external specialist to review… employees’ wages and entitlements” and “rectify any identified underpayments”.

Earlier this year, the authority also banned Safe Hands – the Finks-linked company involved in the Nauru security operation with MA Services – from operating in Victoria.

There is no suggestion from this masthead that the alleged improper conduct of MA Services has been personally directed by Ahuja or that he is guilty of any criminal or unlawful civil conduct.

A Department of Home Affairs spokesperson said the ACIC’s contract involved guards that were “licensed, hold a security clearance and are also subject to the ACIC’s Organisational Suitability Assessment”.

A spokesperson for the National Anti-Corruption Commission said it had - through an arrangement with the ACIC- engaged MA Services to guard its offices over the past year, but had recently appointed a new provider.

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