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Sharangan Maheswaran, who is yet to give evidence to the ICAC, appears to have the uncanny ability to be everywhere all at once, including being in the male bathroom near the commission’s hearing room at the very same time another witness, Charles Perrottet, was availing himself of the facilities.
Maheswaran, 36, is a key link to many troubled folk facing this Independent Commission Against Corruption inquiry. He was the lawyer and right-hand man to fugitive developer Jean Nassif, and best buddies with a private investigator engaged to surveil targets and a former Strathfield councillor.
Earlier this week, when fugitive developer Nassif was in the middle of his rabid ravings from his Beirut bedroom, Nassif was asked whether he was getting messages from Maheswaran while giving evidence. “No, no, no,” said Nassif.
“Have you spoken to Sharangan about what to say in relation to your telephone intercepts?” he was asked. Nassif denied this, along with the suggestion he and Maheswaran had discussed Charles Perrottet’s evidence.
Perrottet, the brother of former premier Dominic Perrottet, has denied receiving a third of the $2 million Nassif paid to lobbyists Jeremy Greenwood and Christian Ellis, allegedly to deliver political outcomes favourable to Nassif. This included attempts to destroy the political career of David Elliott and to have building commissioner David Chandler removed from office.
Officials seized Maheswaran’s mobile phone and laptop as he flew back from Singapore on March 2, 2023. This was just two days after dramatic police raids on Nassif’s Sydney home and office in connection with an investigation by the NSW Police into Nassif’s involvement in an alleged $150 million fraud. A warrant has since been issued for Nassif’s arrest over the matter.
Maheswaran’s lightning trip to Singapore in February 2023 appears to be of some interest to the commission, which has heard that Maheswaran sent a text message to Greenwood on February 27, 2023, saying, “Just with Jean, he’s yelling at the Hermes staff.”
Nassif insisted he was in Lebanon, where he had fled two months earlier in December 2022.
“They, they can, they can talk as much as they want,” he protested. “The fact is I was sick, lying in bed, having operations in that time in 2023 in Lebanon.”
“All, all 2023 I had health problems,” he told the commission.
“So would your travel records then show that you were in Lebanon in February 2023?” counsel assisting, Dr Peggy Dwyer, SC, asked. “A hundred per cent,” retorted Nassif.
Maheswaran also featured – not in a good way – in the bizarre testimony given on Thursday by a convicted embezzler.
Tying himself into the equivalent of a Gordian knot, former real estate agent Mohammad Abedin offered a series of embarrassing contradictions about a statement he provided to the ICAC in August 2023.
Abedin struggled to remember anything that was in his statement, offering that maybe it was because he was “short-sighted”.
His statement contained damaging allegations about former Strathfield mayor Matthew Blackmore, who had worked in Abedin’s real estate agency, which has since gone down the gurgler.
Months earlier, then-mayor Blackmore had informed the ICAC of an alleged blackmail attempt by Maheswaran, a fellow councillor.
At a meeting in January, Maheswaran told Blackmore that for the past five months he had been under surveillance by a private investigator, who recorded his activities.
Maheswaran also threatened to distribute damaging flyers about Blackmore, who eventually agreed to hand over the mayoralty.
Dressed in a three-piece suit with a bright-pink tie, Abedin, who has English as a second language, insisted that he’d used ChatGPT on his phone to write the statement. It was pointed out he didn’t have that app on his phone.
Juliet Curtin, counsel assisting the inquiry, said tartly: “If there was evidence of ChatGPT being used to create this statement, the commission would have it. It has none. It does not exist.”
Abedin then claimed he was overseas when he prepared the statement and that he’d left that particular phone in Bangladesh.
Although he was adamant that Maheswaran had nothing to do with his statement, he struggled to explain why the commission had found an attachment on Maheswaran’s phone containing an unsigned document titled Mohammad Evidence Statement.
And when had Abedin last spoken to Maheswaran? “The day before yesterday,” he said.
The Everywhere Man is due to give evidence on Friday morning.
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