Markets 
A two-year attempted clean-up of Victoria’s Big Build has failed to stop large sums of money flowing from state and federally funded projects to the underworld. Payments are still being made this year.
An explosive leak from an associate of Mick Gatto exposes his secret empire, revealing a sprawling and continuing money trail from Big Build subcontractors to the gangland veteran and his associates. More than a dozen subcontractors on Labor projects have placed Gatto on their payroll.
The revelations come amid a separate leak revealing principal contractors confidentially documented state government directions to cave in to the CFMEU’s lawless takeover of the Big Build. The CFMEU’s Big Build takeover became entrenched while now Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan was minister responsible for the government’s signature $100 billion infrastructure program.
The situation allowed gangland figures embedded in the union to profit from the unprecedented boom in publicly funded construction.
Big Build firms have separately broken their silence to publicly declare they had paid Gatto “due to the power of [the CFMEU] to stop our access” to projects.
Business records leaked to this masthead and 60 Minutes by Gatto network insiders confirm several Big Build subcontractors are still paying Gatto, a self-styled “mediator and arbitrator”, large sums two years after Allan publicly vowed to stop such conduct.
On Sunday, Allan deployed her preferred refrain, urging anyone with information about payments to underworld figures to alert the police, as she defended her government’s efforts to clean up the state’s construction industry.
The state opposition repeated its call for a royal commission.
The leaked records show repeated payments in 2025 and 2026 from the owners of multiple Big Build subcontractors, including Cycon Civil, Project Labour Solutions and Elite Roads.
Dozens of payments to Gatto from Big Build subcontractors totalling millions of dollars have been made as Allan repeatedly said over the past two years that she had zero tolerance for wrongdoing on taxpayer-funded projects.
This masthead has separately confirmed that multiple owners of Big Build firms with Gatto on their payroll have previously made donations to the state Labor Party and the CFMEU as another means of seeking to improve access to the Big Build.
The Victorian government is also still licensing Big Build labour hire providers despite their owners making recent payments to Gatto and other gangland-linked fixers. The providers include a major crane company and a large labour hire firm.
Former senior Victoria Police anti-corruption detective Daniel Baulch said the corruption that had infested Victoria’s Big Build was comparable to that in Papua New Guinea, where he served as deputy commissioner of the notoriously graft-ridden country’s corruption commission.
“I think the way in which it operates is very, very similar [to PNG], and it was really surprising,” said Baulch, who is now a leading anti-money-laundering expert. “There’s a phrase that I keep hearing [connected to the Big Build], and I’ve heard it a lot over my time [dealing with] organised crime and in corruption. It’s: ‘Everybody eats’.”
This masthead revealed on Saturday that some of the state’s biggest principal contractors claimed in secret correspondence from 2023 and 2024 that the state government had directed them to cave in to the CFMEU takeover of the Big Build for “political” reasons and in the knowledge it was causing massive cost blowouts.
In 2024, the Metro Tunnel consortium told the government this had blown out labour costs on the project by almost $200 million.
On Sunday, Victoria’s top labour hire cop separately launched a scathing attack on large contractors, without singling any out, saying huge gaps in the law meant they were getting away with or supporting what should be “unlawful conduct”.
“Ultimately, the fish rots from the head; the principal contractor is the head,” Labour Hire Commissioner Steve Dargavel said, calling for law reform.
Victoria’s former top anti-corruption officials – ex-ombudsman Deborah Glass and former senior judge and Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission chief Robert Redlich – also used a joint statement to describe the rolling Big Build scandal as the worst in the state’s history and to call for an urgent royal commission.
“This is an unprecedented historic scandal,” Redlich said. “I know of no scandal that’s involved the sort of public wastage that has occurred here, and it’s only a royal commission that can root out all of the causes, all of the reasons why the checks and balances that are in place have failed.”
Gatto’s empire has been laid bare by figures in firms connected to his gangland crew who have requested anonymity to preserve their safety.
More than a dozen Big Build firms have paid Gatto and, to a lesser extent, his associates, including his right-hand man, John Khoury.
“If you don’t pay Gatto, you don’t get access to the Big Build. Through Gatto, and through the union, they control who goes onto the project and who doesn’t get access to the project,” one owner of a Big Build subcontractor said, describing how he had paid Gatto for the right to work on major projects ultimately funded by taxpayers.
“If we didn’t have to pay Gatto, we would do the work for cheaper, and ultimately it’s the general public that pay for that.”
The insider confirmed that Tony Ciccone, who owns major Big Build subcontractors Cycon Civil and Project Labour Solutions, is still making payments to Gatto. The insider enabled this masthead to access Gatto’s business records, revealing three companies controlled by Ciccone have paid Gatto over $1 million dollars in total.
Ciccone-controlled firms made more than 30 payments to Gatto-controlled consulting firms Arbitrations and Mediations Pty Ltd and Bridgeview Consulting from mid-2020 until May of this year ranging from $5000 to $250,000.
Cycon Civil and Project Labour Solutions – which have a Victorian government licence to provide workers to major projects – work across the Big Build, servicing state and federally funded projects such as the North East Link, the Westgate Tunnel and several rail level-crossing removal projects.
Records also reveal Ciccone donated several thousand dollars in 2022 to Victorian Labor’s election campaign and gave $45,000 to the CFMEU while it was still a major Labor donor.
Quizzed about the payments to Gatto, Labor and the CFMEU, Ciccone denied making them.
“No payments to any of them. Sorry mate can’t help I’ve retired,” he said in a text message.
Gatto also declined to answer questions, although he has previously denied receiving money from Big Build subcontractors and he has said he is not involved in any wrongdoing.
The Gatto network insider also had records showing the accountants of another Big Build labour hire operator still operating in the Big Build recently paid Gatto $500,000, while separately donating to the Labor Party at the same time as Ciccone.
Corruption expert Geoffrey Watson, SC, who wrote a damning report into the CFMEU, said gangland-linked Big Build firms had donated to state Labor for the same reason they paid Gatto: to get privileged access or remain on the Big Build and other big Victorian projects.
“The point is that they want the connections with the Labor Party the same way that they wanted with the CFMEU” by paying Gatto, Watson said.
Redlich described firms paying gangland figures to access projects as a type of extortion that could be properly countered only with a royal commission.
Another frequent and regular payer of Gatto is scandal-tainted firm Women in Construction. Records reveal the company paid him more than $700,000 since it started supplying female workers to the Big Build, including multiple payments in 2025 and 2026 of between $16,000 and $40,000.
The company’s owner, Luke Ellery, who has two family violence convictions, has previously denied any wrongdoing. He could not be reached for comment for this article.
Last week, and after this masthead revealed that Women in Construction had been run by men with criminal records and deep gangland links, Dargavel, the labour hire commissioner, issued an order tearing up the firm’s licence and giving it until this coming Friday to remove its workers from the $26 billion North East Link road tunnel project.
Construction industry insiders, speaking anonymously due to the threat of repercussions, said Ellery was now seeking to move his company’s Big Build workforce to another labour hire firm with gangland links.
The leak also outs asphalting firm Elite Roads as making regular payments to Gatto this year, and in 2025 and 2024.
Elite Roads’ manager director, Deon Coote, declined to answer questions when called, referring queries to a company email.
When asked to confirm why the firm had paid Gatto and how much, a marketing manager responded: “All contracts obtained by Elite Roads on Victoria’s Big Build were secured through a rigorous and fully scrutinised procurement process. We have no information relevant to your enquiry.”
Some Gatto payers did provide public comments. Tony Paragalli, owner of labour hire firm M1 Trades & Labour, said his firm had to pay Gatto to retain work. Various M1 entities paid Gatto over $1 million.
“We have only ever won contracts conducted through the proper commercial and legal processes. Unfortunately, the issue we found was that after winning commercial tenders we were blocked from working on sites by the union,” he said.
“We tried to negotiate with the union directly, but we did not have the personal relationships and it did not work. After repeated failed attempts, in 2012 we reluctantly joined other companies in employing Mr Gatto to provide industrial relations services and which then allowed us to provide the work we had successfully won through the tenders.”
Paragalli said he did not “want to use this [Gatto industrial relations] service, but we felt we had no choice due to the power of the union to stop our access to the site. We stopped paying Mr Gatto for his union IR services in May 2025. As soon as we stopped paying Mr Gatto we started to get blocked from some sites again where we had already won tenders,” he said.
“We have nothing to hide and have already presented all our company deeds, bank accounts and all other records to all authorities and regulators to fully establish the facts.”
Rangedale, whose trucks service Big Build and government water projects, paid Gatto more than $250,000 up until April this year.
Rangedale director Neil Kermeen also said his company engaged Gatto’s mediation business “solely for the purpose of mediating an ongoing dispute between Rangedale and the CFMEU”.
“The outcome of the mediation was simply that Rangedale was able to continue performing work on projects where it had already established itself over many years prior to that engagement,” Kermeen said in an emailed statement.
Kermeen said Gatto had never assisted Rangedale “influence the awarding of contracts”, all of which he said Rangedale had won on merit.
The owner of Big Build subcontractor Major Cranes, Norm D’Ambra, has also made recent and regular $40,000 payments to Gatto totalling more than $500,000.
Another D’Ambra company, S and N Cranes, has an active Victorian government labour hire licence, enabling it to send crane workers across the Big Build.
Files analysed by this masthead reveal D’Ambra also paid Gatto to get the CFMEU to stop forcing his firms off major Victorian projects, but when he was called by this masthead on Friday, D’Ambra hung up the phone.
Former senior law enforcement official Dan Baulch, who analysed the information provided by the Gatto network insider, said he could see no legitimate reason for any firm on the Big Build, or servicing any other large project, to pay Gatto.
Baulch said the fact companies were still paying Gatto showed that police, despite their best efforts, did not have the power or resources to stop such an entrenched system. He, too, called for a royal commission.
“I think they [Victorians] deserve nothing but the truth. This absolutely needs to be exposed,” he said.
Stan Dryden, whose Indigenous Big Build labour hire firm Jarrah closed in mid-2025 but which previously listed Gatto’s daughter’s company as a shareholder, denied paying Gatto’s industrial relations company, despite records showing he had given Gatto $50,000 in mid-2025.
The owner of since-collapsed Metro Tunnel subcontractor A C Civil Build Pty Ltd, Rocco ‘Rocky’ Barba, also admitted paying Gatto. Records show Barba’s companies have paid Gatto or Khoury about $250,000 over several years.
Barba initially said he had engaged Gatto oly to “negotiate with” the CFMEU before he got an enterprise bargaining agreement in 2003. He later said he “might have used him to do some IR work” closer to when A C Civil went into liquidation in 2023.
Barba also said he paid Gatto and Khoury a fee for helping him offload formwork.
“That was a finder’s fee as far as we were concerned. They done us a favour,” Barba said, adding he considered Gatto a friend. “He’s always helped me.”
Big Build subcontractor LTE has paid Khoury between $400,000 and $700,000 a year over several years.
The firm has previously denied making the payments. When Khoury was called on Friday, he said: “I haven’t received that mate … f—ing hell. You gotta prove that one, mate.”
Prior to its collapse, Big Build subcontractor Adcon, which also worked on the Metro Tunnel, paid Gatto over $1 million. Adcon founder Danny Isaacs, who moved to Dubai amid the collapse of his company in 2023, could not be reached for comment.
Nick McKenzie is an Age investigative journalist who has three times been named the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year. A winner of 20 Walkley Awards, including the Gold Walkley, he investigates politics, business, foreign affairs and criminal justice.Connect via email.
Lachlan Abbott is a crime reporter at The Age. He was previously a city reporter and covered breaking news.Connect via email.From our partners
Read the full article here
