Margaret Cunneen has accused the Independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac) of stripping away her family’s human rights and said the police should investigate any leaks from the commission.
The Sydney crown prosecutor has spoken out against Icac in the wake of the high court ruling that the commission did not have the power to investigate her over allegations she told her son’s girlfriend, Sophia Tilley, to fake chest pains to avoid an alcohol breath test after a car crash.
“You get a lot of attacks when you make your life as a prosecutor, a lot of attacks, professional attacks,” she told Ray Hadley on 2GB radio in Sydney on Friday morning. “Some of them have been quite inexplicable but this time they attacked my family and for my family to have their most basic human rights stripped away in the way that was threatened and the way that was done was quite intolerable.
“I knew in my gut from the start that it was really a massive blunder.”
Cunneen also attacked the Sydney Morning Herald, accusing it of being on a witch hunt after it published a front page story on Thursday saying the trigger for Icac’s investigation was a phone tap by police investigating organised crime, though Cunneen was not the target. She said the police should investigate if the information came from a leak from Icac.
“I have very good reason to have a good idea about [who made the initial complaint],” she said. “In fact there’s some very obvious proofs which I won’t go into, but for any newspaper in Sydney to be continuing to try to give me another go on the ducking stool they used to use for witches, by suggesting it’s anything to do with phone taps. It’s nonsense because I never spoke on the phone about this matter on that night at all because [my son] Stephen rang his father about the accident and his father rang me.
“I’d be extraordinarily surprised if anyone in the Icac, knowing that the inspector is looking closely at this matter ... would be so foolish as to leak something at this stage.”
Icac inspector David Levine has announced he will review the decision to investigate Cunneen and criticised the commission for not making a statement on the high court decision.
“I am of the view that the present standing of the Icac in the eyes of the public whose interests it exists to champion on issues of corruption and integrity is, to say the least, unhappy,” he said on Thursday.
“I express this view as the inspector and I express it of the Icac as a statutory entity. It is my view that Icac is duty-bound to inform the public to indicate what it is doing and what it proposes to do and to give some explanation for the course it has taken not only in relation to Operation Hale [the Cunneen case] but any other outstanding matters.”
Hadley introduced Cunneen on his radio show by declaring he had an interest because he thought Cunneen was an “outstanding woman” who had “been to hell and back”.
Asked if she thought she was damaged by the saga, Cunneen said she refused to see herself that way. She said she planned to return to her role at the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, from which she stepped down when the Icac investigation was announced, after a short break.
“It certainly made our family bond stronger,” she said. “Every single person in the family has suffered, although my three sons have been happy I’ve had so much more time to iron their shirts in the last eight months.”
Cunneen spoke about the night of the accident in May last year, and said she had only recently found out the police had not arrived at the scene before Tilley was taken to hospital.
“It was so frightening,” she said. “I was in tears when I got there. I spoke to my son and then I asked for permission to walk up the stairs into the ambulance to ask Sophia if I could contact her parents, which she didn’t want me to do on that day because she didn’t want to worry them, but that was the extent of the conversation and shortly she was taken off to the hospital.”
At the hospital a blood test returned a zero alcohol reading. Icac raided the homes of Tilley and Cunneen, confiscating mobile phones, and announced the investigation in October.
When Cunneen took Icac to court, the supreme court found against her, but the court of appeal overturned its finding. Icac lost its appeal to the high court against that decision on Wednesday.
Four of the five high court justices agreed that Icac had no power to investigate the allegations against Cunneen because they did not fit the definition of “corrupt conduct” in the NSW legislation that established Icac’s scope.
